

IPv6 day: Turn Off IPv4 on 6 June 2014 - cornholio
http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2013/12/campaign-turn-off-ipv4-on-6-june-2014-for-one-day/

======
ancarda
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.

~~~
josteink
_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?

~~~
ancarda
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.

------
schoen
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).

~~~
__david__
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…

------
josteink
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

------
cornholio
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.

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

~~~
cornholio
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 :)

~~~
manacit
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.

------
zagpen
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.

~~~
devicenull
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.

------
ars
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.

~~~
taf2
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. :(

------
TheLoneWolfling
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.

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

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
5mbit is a mite low.

Also, how much latency does it add?

------
YokoZar
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.

~~~
q3k
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).

------
danieldk
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...

~~~
justincormack
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.

~~~
eggnet
It's 464XLAT
[http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6877](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

~~~
eggnet
Sorry, android 4.4.2

------
D4AHNGM
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'.

------
kreddor
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.

~~~
kseistrup
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.

------
lucb1e
Was already planning this :)

------
kogir
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.

~~~
danyork
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. :-)

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

[0] [http://www.worldipv6launch.org/](http://www.worldipv6launch.org/) [1]
[http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2012/01/world-...](http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2012/01/world-
ipv6-launch-on-june-6-2012-to-bring-permanent-ipv6-deployment/)

~~~
1ris
When was it not serious?

