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by ac29 77 days ago
> I don’t want some of my devices to be publicly addressable at all, even if I mess up something at the firewall while updating the rules. NAT provides this by default.

This feels like a strawman. If you are making the sort of change that accidentally disables your IPv6 firewall completely, you could accidentally make a change that exposed IPv4 devices as well (accidentally enabling DMZ, or setting up port forwarding incorrectly for example).

1 comments

As someone who has done this while tired, it’s a lot easier to accidentally open extra ports to a publicly routable IP (or overbroad range of IPs) than it is to accidentally enable port forwarding or DMZ.
You could accidentally swap ips to one that had a port forward, some applications can ask routers to forward, etc etc. I donmt know how exactly we'd measure the various potential issues but they seem incredibly minor compared to the sheer amount of breakage created by widespread nat.
I don’t have any problems with NAT on my network.