Disabling IPv6 – Confessions of a UI

A couple of days ago I decided to disable IPv6 on the network and set about to find the best way to do it. The reasons for/against disabling IPv6 are quite a talking point and outside of the scope of this article, however I will provide a brief summary:

• MS best practice is to leave it turned on
• MS test all of their products with it turned on, so if you want the most compatible environment its probably better to leave it on.
• Disabling IPv6 means you lose features that are dependant on it, such as Homegroups – but there is nothing “essential” that will break.
• Disabling it can lead to faster network performance (marginal) as the OS will try and use IPv6 as default and fall back to IPv4 after a short timeout. a good example of this is DNS and DHCP as it will check the IPv6 versions first, wait for the timeout and then go to the IPv4 versions that you almost certainly use.
• Regardless of it being enabled/disabled, if want to make security the focus then you should block all IP protocol 41 and UDP 3544 traffic at the perimiter firewall – just to be sure no IPv6 traffic gets routed into the network.
• It is the future, although clearly not as immediate as everyone makes out. To be honest I wouldn’t be suprised to see IPv6 making more of an impact in the cloud environments over the next couple of years, but I don’t expect any local networks or businesses to migrate to it any time soon. Too much cost, not enough benefit.

Anyway back to the issue, essentially there are two ways of disabling:

Read more of this post