Disabling IPv6

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Level 1

58 points

Disabling IPv6

I'm trying to disable my IPv6 as per suggestions from this site:

http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/208193448/10_Simple_Tips_for_Boosting_The_Secu rity_Of_Your_Mac

Instructions from Apple say to "Click on the Configure IPv6 pop-up menu (typically set to Automatically) and select Off."

There is no OFF in the pop-up menu!

There is 'Automatically'

There is 'Manually'

There is 'Local-link only'

There is no OFF!

How do you turn this thing OFF?

Any suggestions from anyone? Thanks.

Mac Mini, Macbook, Mac OS X (10.7.2), iPod Classic

Posted on Apr 10, 2012 6:38 PM

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Answer 1

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Tesserax

Level 10

148,309 points

Apr 10, 2012 10:16 PM in response to miniman

To disable IPv6 in OS X Lion, you will need to use the Terminal.

Applications > Utilities > Terminal
To determine what are all of your Mac's network interfaces are, issue the following command: networksetup -listallnetworkservices
To disable IPv6 for wireless, issue the following command: networksetup -setv6off Wi-Fi; to disable IPv6 for Ethernet, issue the following command: networksetup -setv6off Ethernet
To re-enable IPv6, use -setv6automatic instead

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Answer 2

miniman Author

Level 1

58 points

Apr 11, 2012 10:59 AM in response to Tesserax

Many thanks Tesserax. That works perfectly.

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Answer 3

Jun 19, 2012 8:30 AM in response to miniman

how do you know it works?

when i use "networksetup -setv6off Wi-Fi", the command completes without obvious error, but i still see evidence of ip6 being used:

beejMBA:~ beej$ telnet www.google.com 80

Trying 2607:f8b0:4002:802::1011...

when i turn off ip6 with "sudo ip6 -x", i get:

beejMBA:personal beej$ telnet www.google.com 80

Trying 74.125.139.147...

which looks better to me...

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Answer 4

Sep 10, 2012 12:20 PM in response to Tesserax

You need to use quote marks around the network name, like this:

To disable IPv6 for wireless, issue the following command: networksetup -setv6off "Wi-Fi"

To turn the iPV6 back on, if you like, just open System Prefs/Network and do it from there in the GUI.

Or, if you prefer, use Terminal. Either works.

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Answer 5

Nov 15, 2012 5:13 PM in response to Tesserax

Related, just to note it somewhere—it seems technically possible to disable the IPv6 loopback address ::1 and friends (which I had to do as they were causing me grief trying to develop Java web apps in a local Eclipse/Tomcat setup where third-party classes were expecting IPv4 format and choking instead… long sad story). From the Terminal:

$ ifconfig lo0 inet6 fe80::1%lo0 delete

$ ifconfig lo0 inet6 ::1 delete

I don’t know if this has negative consequences (e.g. the Bonjour subsystem etc) and wouldn’t expect it to persist between restarts (but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader), but it generally seems to work for me.

Oh, and Mountain Lion doesn’t seem to have the ip6 utility anymore (well, it’s not on my clean Mountain Lion 10.8.2 install, anyway)?

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