p1mrxIPv6 support for lemmy.world?
wiaWhy does it matter? Actually curious.
The more servers have IPv6 support the more it will become the standard and we can finally switch to it instead of IPv4.
Now why you'd wanna switch, the main reason is there are far too few IPv4 addresses available for every device to actually have a unique IPv4 address, and that results in all sorts of headaches.
Slightly off topic, but perhaps you can point me in the right direction. I recently upgraded my home router/NAT firewall to one that runs pfSense and it now supports IPv6. I was slightly horrified to find that DHCP had assigned all my devices IPv6 addresses and that they were all publicly routable. Comments online seemed to indicate that in order to protect devices on my local network from being probed by external entities I'd have to create custom firewall rules. I know just enough to know I didn't want to do that as the likelihood of doing it wrong and compromising security far outweighed any benefit I'd see from IPv6. The only other option was to disable all IPv6 traffic at the firewall.
What am I missing here? Is it intended that regular home users have their printer, which the manufacturer hasn't seen fit to update since Bush Jr. was president, exposed to the entire Internet? Is it that the IPv6 space is so large that port scanning for vulnerable machines is like finding a needle in a haystack?
Generally this isn't an issue for home users. Pretty much every home router defaults to denying incoming connections but allowing outgoing ones, for both IPv4 and IPv6.
In both cases you can of course configure the router to allow incoming connections on certain ports and (for IPv6) IP addresses (unless you're behind CGNAT), but it's almost never the default.
For IPv4 this happens to be a necessity of NAT: without additional configuration, the router simply doesn't know which device is being addressed because they all use the router's IPv4, so it can't forward it. For IPv6 this is a good and extremely common default firewall configuration, especially for routers intended for connecting private networks to the Internet.
The only real difference is that for outgoing IPv4 connections they typically all come from the same IPv4 (as seen from outside the local network) while for outgoing IPv6 you can potentially distinguish^1^ between different devices.
^1^: Not reliably, mind you: a device can have multiple IPv6 addresses, and many default to changing the one they use for outgoing connections every so often. Theoretically they could even re-use one that was previously used by another device, but that's vanishingly unlikely unless specifically configured to do so.