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drAlberT
Asked: 2009-10-03 03:27:35 +0800 CST

How to completely disable IPV6 on Mac OS X (10.5 +)?

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I'd like to avoid my Mac OS X machine from using ipv6 at all.

I'm looking for a programmatic way to disable ipv6 on every network interface and, possibly, to avoid ipv6 support by the kernel at all.

As an explanation, I need the equivalent of adding "alias ipv6 off" to modprobe.conf in linux.

The "it's impossible" answer is welcome, being supported by some kind of official source, of course.

EDIT:

I want to remove ipv6 from logs, from ipfw, from everywhere. Even for the satisfaction of knowing if and how it is possible. It is is right to do it is another issue :)

networking

6 Answers

  1. You can disable IP6 for a specific device with 

    networksetup -setv6off Service name
(i.e  networksetup -setv6off "Ethernet 1")

    and get the list of all possible services with

    networksetup -listallnetworkservices

    See man networksetup for more info.

    I don't know if you can tell networksetup to perform the command for every interface at once, but it shouldn't be too hard to write a short script that iterates over the output of the list command and disable IP6 on all devices.

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  2. As already mentioned by neoice the 'ip6' tool is useful here. This allows you to disable IPv6 per interface, or 'ip6 -x' disables all but the loopback interface.

    You can disable IPv6 on the loopback interface with

    ip6 -d lo0

    When I tried this though, DNS resolution stopped working.

    So: Yes you can completely disable IPv6, but you'll get a seriously impaired system.

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  3. This will disable ipv6 on all network adapters:

    #!/bin/sh
IFS=$'\n'
net=`networksetup -listallnetworkservices | grep -v asterisk`

for i in $net
do
    networksetup -setv6off "$i"
done
exit 0
    • 1

  4. In reply to your comment on SvenW's answer:

    My goal is to make my systems totally IPV6 ignorant, is it possible?

    While IPv6 isn't used everywhere yet, it will be - maybe after a few years. So I'm guessing, and it would make sense, that IPv6 is as integrated to OS X as IPv4 was, and you would need to rebuild the kernel (and probably some applications) to remove any of them. (I don't have any sources though.)

    • 0

  5. this page looks informative. it looks like it does work if run as root. I dont feel like disabling it permanently, so I cant confirm the sysctl command.

    root@Shambhala:~# ifconfig
lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 16384
    inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128 
    inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1 
    inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000 
en0: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
    inet6 fe80::21b:63ff:fea5:de87%en0 prefixlen 64 tentative scopeid 0x4 
    media: autoselect status: inactive
en1: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
    inet 172.16.11.98 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 172.16.11.255
    inet6 fe80::21c:b3ff:fe77:c434%en1 prefixlen 64 tentative scopeid 0x5  
    media: autoselect status: active
    supported media: autoselect
vboxnet0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
    inet6 fe80::276:62ff:fe00:0%vboxnet0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x7 
    ether 00:76:62:00:00:00 

root@Shambhala:~# ip6 -x
root@Shambhala:~# ifconfig 
lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 16384
    inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128 
    inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1 
    inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000 
en0: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
    media: autoselect status: inactive
en1: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
    inet 172.16.11.98 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 172.16.11.255
    media: autoselect status: active
    supported media: autoselect
vboxnet0: flags=8842<BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
    ether 00:76:62:00:00:00

    it looks like ipv6 stays enabled on the loopback device though...

    • 0

  6. You said ipfw takes ipv6 rules. So you can simply block ipv6 there, this happens in kernel and nothing ipv6-related will work.

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