Today I Learned
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
view the rest of the comments
If you have enough IPs then not using NAT makes everything less complicated without any downside to security. If you think otherwise then IPv6 is going to cause you some problems.
NAT isn’t “security” in the cryptographic sense, but saying “no NAT has no downside to security” ignores what NAT + private addressing is used for: a hard boundary that prevents a whole class of accidental exposure.
Easy examples:
Home network analogy: Your laptop has a private IP (192.168.x.x). People on the internet can’t just connect to it unless you explicitly port-forward. If your router’s firewall rule is messy or you temporarily enable a service, that laptop still isn’t automatically internet-reachable. With public IPs on every device, a single bad rule can put that laptop directly on the internet.
Someone enables RDP/SSH “just to test something"? Behind NAT, it’s usually still not reachable inbound unless you publish it. With public addressing everywhere, one mis-scoped firewall rule (or host firewall disabled) can instantly make it reachable from anywhere.
With NAT, “what’s internet-facing?” is basically “what did we intentionally publish on the edge” (load balancer, reverse proxy, VPN gateway). With public IPs on every endpoint, “what’s internet-facing?” becomes “prove the firewall posture for thousands of hosts and ports,” which is harder and riskier at scale.
You’re right that IPv6 removes the address shortage reason for NAT. But IPv6 does not mean “everything must be publicly reachable.” The IPv6 equivalent of “internal-only” is using ULA (fc00::/7) for internal addressing, and/or using globally routable IPv6 but keeping a default-deny inbound firewall and publishing only through controlled ingress (reverse proxy, load balancer, VPN/Zero Trust).
So the point isn’t “NAT = security.” The point is: NAT + private addressing is a very effective exposure control and mistake-buffer. You can replicate the security model without NAT (especially in IPv6), but you do it with addressing design + strict firewalling + controlled ingres, not by claiming there’s no downside.
You don't want every device on your network publicly addressable, it's going to cause you some problems.
That's not how that works
NAT is not a firewall. If you don't have a Firewall in place bad things will happen.
For IPv6 you just set your Firewall to deny all and then add exceptions as needed. That is the default pretty much everywhere.
What's not how what works? What about the other poster's comment is inaccurate?