A recent post on twitter shared a Swedish website that briefly describes how to disable IPv4 on Windows (see below), Linux and MacOS.

I often explain to my students that IPv4 might be disabled and considered as historic after my retirement, which is not expected to happen soon… Geoff Huston also explained in a recent presentation some of the hurdles to the complete deprecation of IPv4.

However, it is interesting for networking engineers to see what happens when IPv4 becomes disabled or unavailable. If you manage a network, I strongly encourage you to first deploy IPv6 and then disable from time to time IPv4 and see what breaks in your network and what parts need to be fixed. With dual-stack networks, there will be situations where one of the address family works perfectly while the other has operational issues. Users don’t understand the difference between IPv4 and IPv6 and they expect that their network will operate without flaws.

If you are an educated user, try to disable IPv4 at home and report to your ISP any problem with one of their own services (email, blog, billing, …). This will motivate them to increase the deployment of IPv6-based services and ensure that they are operating correctly. At a recent meeting of the Belgian IPv6 Council, Voo reported that with their new cable gateways, users could opt-out of IPv4 and one of their users chose this configuration…