Comment by pregnenolone
1 month ago
As someone with limited networking knowledge, I’m not really getting smarter here. Some say it adds security; others disagree. Let me ask this: does IPv6 benefit me in any way if I have multiple devices at home behind a router and I'm not running any servers or similar services?
No idea what you're doing on a daily basis, but let's grab a not-exactly random example. You and your friends are at your house trying to play an online game of King's Court (it's super checkers!) with some friends in Denmark. For whatever reason the developers decided all clients will use port 12345 to communicate. In ipv4 with NAT, local connections will be possible but only the first one to try to communicate out will ever possibly succeed. You and your friend are thwarted and have to find some NAT-defeating means or just give up on doing 10-jump moves to ruin each other's evenings and have an internet drinking game. With IPv6, all of it works fine.
Most casual users have lived with NAT so long they assume its limitations are natural. But they are not. You can achieve the same result with a firewall or ACLs or whatever on ipv6, but that's a choice and not a limitation.
Do you play video games with P2P networking? Then your choices are to pick one of the following:
- the hosting player enables upnp
- use ipv6
- the hosting player manually sets up port forwarding (consumer routers often talk about a DMZ option which takes an IP address - really this is just forwarding all ports not matched by any other rule)
STUN
Smart home and lighting standard Matter over Thread requires it. Discovered this after i bought some Ikea smart lights. Though you don't need a public IP6, a local static IP6 with SLAAC is enough.
No