IPv6 day: Turn Off IPv4 on 6 June 2014 | Hacker News Reader

IPv6 day: Turn Off IPv4 on 6 June 2014

internetsociety.org

44 pointscornholio39 comments

I had* an IPv6 tunnel for about a year and only a few months ago I turned off IPv4 to see how far we've come.

Practically everything broke. Nearly all websites I use on a daily basis didn't work. The frustrating thing is a lot of programs broke as well, usually because of a single weak link; e.g. Bitcoin failed to bootstrap, Bittorrent couldn't reach most trackers. etc... however I'd regularly see IPv6 traffic in Little Snitch so these programs did support IPv6, it's just whatever they use for bootstrapping didn't.

My experience was a lot of websites/programs have partial support but usually a key component isn't dual stacked which breaks the whole thing.

For instance, despite the fact my router has built-in IPv6 tunnelling, I can't manage the admin interface over IPv6.

* Me disabling my IPv6 tunnel wasn't related to this, it was extremely unstable; it dropped at-least once a week which was quite disruptive. If anyone can recommend a tunnel provider other than SixXS, I'll participate on the 6th.

I've had very good success with an he.net tunnel.

And for those saying "in 2014 there should be no need for a &%%^ IPv6 tunnel", congratulations on living in the big city. For rural Internet (blazing 6mpbs here!) IPv6 is as far down the priority list as it could possibly get. Asking (as a consumer) doesn't do any good, I'm probably the only person demanding IPv6 for 50 miles in any direction. They're not likely to make the expenditure just for li'l ol' me.

Me disabling my IPv6 tunnel wasn't related to this, it was extremely unstable; it dropped at-least once a week which was quite disruptive. If anyone can recommend a tunnel provider other than SixXS, I'll participate on the 6th.

Pardon my french, but in 2014 there should be no fucking need for you to tunnel.

While IPv6-day in 2013 was about showing how IPv6 isn't "scary" and that enabling it wont cause havoc around the internets, like lots of site-admins irrationally feared, I think the main point this year is highlighting and shaming ISP which still haven't gotten their act together.

If you need to tunnel to "participate" in this years event, your ISP is the target. Go ask for native IPv6.

Edit: Other people in this thread seem to say otherwise. Anyway: How can you disable IPv4 when your tunnelled IPv6-connection relies on it?

My ISP (BT) has a full IPv6 implementation but it's not targeted at home users right now. I'll try contacting their customer support to ask about rollout plans but frankly, I don't think I'll get anywhere.

Personally, I think the point of IPv6 day was to provide people with something to access over IPv6. I got a tunnel after IPv6 day but I think I only used it on Google.

How can you disable IPv4 when your tunnelled IPv6-connection relies on it?

For me I was able to disable IPv4 as my router did the tunnelling for me, however I feel this article is primarily targeting those with native IPv6.

I think the main point this year is highlighting and shaming ISP which still haven't gotten their act together.

Wikipedia has a nice list¹ that can be used for this.

Go ask for native IPv6.

Sadly my broadband provider, Telia, is one of those nice old telecom companies who're still living in the stone age. Can't switch over to anything else either as my lessor has a monopoly agreement with them.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_deployment

> shaming ISP which still haven't gotten their act together

Deutsche Telekom: requires customers to switch to a new contract (with worse conditions) in order to get a native v6 prefix

Kabel BW: requires customers to give up their routable v4 address if they want to get v6, as they only offer DS-lite, no real dual-stack.

> If anyone can recommend a tunnel provider other than SixXS

he.net just works, using this for 6 months now, did not notice a single outage. SixXS is an unprofessional kindergarden, I would not recommend using them for anything relevant.

Some commenters seem to be missing the detail that the linked page proposes turning off IPv4 on your personal devices, not on any shared infrastructure or public services, for one day as an experiment to see how much functionality you lose (and maybe motivate you to contact other parties to ask them to improve their IPv6 support).

I'm afraid it doesn't really take an experiment to determine what will happen in my case, as my ISP (RoadRunner) doesn't support IPv6 at all (in my area?). So doing this would only result in a day without any internet…

Because HN (the site itself) is constantly behind the times with regard to anything technological, I just double-checked it's IPv6 status and the results were as expected:

    $ dig AAAA news.ycombinator.com
    
    ; <<>> DiG 9.9.5-3-Ubuntu <<>> AAAA news.ycombinator.com
    ;; global options: +cmd
    ;; Got answer:
    ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 52093
    ;; flags: qr rd ra ad; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
    
    ;; QUESTION SECTION:
    ;news.ycombinator.com.		IN	AAAA
    
    ;; Query time: 2 msec
    ;; SERVER: 192.168.1.1#53(192.168.1.1)
    ;; WHEN: Sun Jun 01 21:29:45 CEST 2014
    ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 38

    $ ping6 news.ycombinator.com
    unknown host

I will redirect all IPv4 to a static page on my site. It’s a clear and simple message to the consumer: your ISP does not give you a modern and adequate service. This is costing me money, I have to pay for IPv4 addresses and I estimate the loss to be significantly higher than 1/365 of my costs. So it’s only natural to reciprocate and deny service for 1/365 of a year.

The only people who should do this are webmasters. If network admins do it, they are breaking IPv6 exactly when it’s the only means to get to my site. It’s also critical that the services are still accessible but non-functional and give a clear reason for it: you are not receiving a proper Internet service. As opposed to a nondescript error message.

Savvy consumers can do it too, off course, but it would have an impact of exactly zero in the grand scheme of things, since deploying IPv6 will cost providers more than the lost 0.05% traffic for a day.

I mean no offense, but this is a bad idea. The OS X implementation of Happy Eyeballs[1] doesn't prefer IPv6 over IPv4, and will often choose IPv4 in a dual stack environment, even when there's perfectly good IPv6 connectivity[2]. The end result of this, of course, is that users are going to see a page bemoaning their ISP when they've done everything right.

Furthermore, I find the reasoning behind breaking your site for a day quite laughable. Do you spend any extra time developing the site for browsers and operating systems other than your preferred? If so, you should block them out for a period of time as well because, by your logic, it's costing you money.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs [2]: https://labs.ripe.net/Members/emileaben/hampered-eyeballs

Any implementation that prefers IPv4 over IPv6 is broken by design, see RFC3484. While I do understand people will do whatever it takes to get things working in the face of incomplete and barely functional IPv6 roll out, that road can only lead to chaos; the only solution is to stick to the standards and fix the actual problems.

As for my "laughable reasoning", you aren't really comparing apples with apples. There clearly needs to be multiple types of devices with different capabilities and it's only natural to support your users. On the other hand there is no need for IPv4 on the internet, quite the contrary, almost all of the backbone infrastructure is dual stack for years and we have the solutions to support and isolate legacy IPv4 systems where that really makes sense. So it's not a technical problem, it's an economic and political problem: the people hurt most by IPv4 can't really do anything to force the rest of the internet to move forward.

But coming back to your argument: sure, standard compliant clients are preferable and I will absolutely drop support for clients that cost me more than they are worth. I can't afford to do that with IPv4 but I feel I need to send a message, for what it's worth. Sure, my site is small and I can afford it, maybe next year more people will do it and so on. Some day you will thank us :)

I would argue that it's a political and economic problem that certain devices exist without the capability to support the latest HTML5/CSS3/JS standards. I worry that your idealism will serve to only upset users, who will undoubtedly blame you, not their ISPs. It would be wonderful if every device conformed to the RFC, but much like certain browsers don't behave to spec, certain implementations of many other internet technologies suffer the same problem.

Of course, I am a proponent of IPv6 deployment (I doubt you'll find many people who are not), but I can't agree with your assertion that IPv4 has no place on the internet, it's practically impossible to force a transition merely by ignoring the world around you and trudging on.

It's only the smallest websites like you that will do this. Which really is the wrong way around. My ISP does not even give me an IPv6 if I beg them for it.

But now imagine what the impact would be if Google, Twitter, Microsoft and Facebook would do this. That would make some waves.

If your loss due to having an IP address is > 1/365th of your costs, forgive me, but then you're not a serious enough player to really matter, likely only a very very few number of people will notice that and they will assume that you're doing them a disservice.

I have Comcast in a major market and my CMTS still doesn't support IPv6. My alternatives are truly atrocious DSL from AT&T... and truly atrocious DSL from AT&T.

Consumer awareness isn't terribly useful combined with a lack of consumer choice.

At least you have Comcast, who is making an effort to implement v6 (even if you don't have it yet).

I have Optimum, who do not appear to be doing anything remotely related to IPv6.

On a Friday really?

Never make any major tech changes on a Friday, unless you want to spend the weekend fixing things.

Sure it should be simple to turn on and off, but for some people it won't be.

Or even worse: Your boss says "You're right - get IPv6 working". And then you are only half done by closing on Friday, and again you are working all weekend.

For me IPv6 was as easy as clicking the button "Enable IPv6" in my router and everything just worked, I didn't have to configure a thing, but it won't be so easy for everyone.

yeah it's definitely more complex than just allowing IPv6 traffic by adding an AAAA record. For example, many applications will have tracking that expects typical IPv4 address format and will break in the presence of an IPv6 address. So even updating the routing layer won't be enough in all cases. :(

My router and all electronic devices at our house support IPv6, but it's irrelevant. The only two ISPs in my area only offer IPv4.

So no, please do not turn off IPv4. I would appreciate still being able to connect to the internet on the 6th of June.

You can install a tunnel - I used to use http://tunnelbroker.net before I got native ipv6. Its free (tunnels are limited to 5mbit though)

5mbit is a mite low.

Also, how much latency does it add?

I had earlier disabled ipv6 entirely on my computer as I was noticing with my ISP that ipv6 routes were subject to problems that the ipv4 routes weren't -- sites timing out more often when on ipv6 (which I knew via the handy IPvFox extension), and general slowness issues. All problems went away when disabling ipv6, and came back when re-enabling it.

Is there a reasonable technical explanation for this phenomenon? I'll turn ipv6 back on this Friday.

Yes - your ISP just has shitty IPv6 routing (ie. poor peering and transit agreements).

Happens on one of my lines as well (“experimental” IPv6 support that basically reaches only 1/3 of the internet).

Even Europe's largest hosting provider (OVH) has some IPv6 issues (their routers seem to ignore your existence if you do not keep spamming NDP NA packets).

We don't even have IPv4 (except over DS-Lite) :). So, I guess I don't have to switch off IPv4 on my devices to participate...

Does everything work? Last time I used a 6 only network (Fosdem) they warned that Android doesnt like 6 only, and I found some services that didnt work over 6to4 at all.

It's 464XLAT http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6877

As far as I can tell it works extremely well, using android 4.2.2 / nexus 5. You get a real ipv6 address and, 192.0.0.4 for your ipv4 address. Applications think both ipv4 and ipv6 are available.

Edit: above information is based on using T-Mobile USA for internet connectivity

Sorry, android 4.4.2

Yep. My Android devices work fine, like the sibling poster, they are all 4.4.2.

As much as I'd like to participate, removing my IPv4 capacity would result in me having zero internet for the day. I've been asking for well over a year about IPv6 to my ISP and each time they've replied along the lines of 'Erm, well, we're thinking about it, kinda, maybe'.

I'm not aware of any ISPs in Denmark that support IPv6. This sucks. I'm switching to the first ISP that will offer it. But as of right now, if I switch off IPv4 I go offline.

Gigabit does, but sadly Gigabit is present only at very few places.

Every year I email the major Danish ISPs, and every year I get the same answer: “Unfortunately we do not yet offer IPv6”. I hope Gigabit will be availbale in my area soon.

Was already planning this :)

Prediction: Eventually it will be too expensive or difficult to get IPv4 addresses. At that time, something backwards compatible will come out, and everyone will adopt it, because it will actually be better and necessary.

Or perhaps more likely, THAT will be the time that some organizations finally realize that they need to make the move to IPv6. Nothing like an added expense to drive behavior. :-)

How do hosts on an ipv4only network know how to get to hosts on the new addresses?

But this time, we're serious. Unlike all the other times.

[0] http://www.worldipv6launch.org/ [1] http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2012/01/world-...

When was it not serious?

maybe you miss the "for one day" part

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