I work with the engineer behind this (different team, but we interact semi-often and work on overlapping projects), but had no idea it was him until I looked at the little copyright notice in the footer. He is a fascinating guy and a fantastic engineer (one of those 10x engineers you hear about) while being humble and always willing to help out.
Thanks for the site for the last 15 years, it's helped me a number of times.
If he doesn't read the thread here, please tell him that a random internet user would like to thank him very much for providing this awesome service, fully understands his choice, and congratulates him for having the willpower to make the choice that is right for him rather than lighting himself on fire to keep others warm.
For me personally, IPv6 still feels like something that only exists in datacenters. I've had it for ages on my servers, but never in my life have I seen a home internet connection that supports it. I'm always surprised to see that I'm using IPv6 whenever I travel e.g. to Europe.
Something about the tone of that post is troubling me. Is it just me or does anybody else sense a bit of distress in those words? He seems to want to keep it private, though. Whatever it is, I hope he has better times ahead with the gratitude of all those who used his service.
Reach out to ben[1] from IPinfo, he took over ip4.me, ip6.me and a number of other websites following the passing of Kevin Loch earlier this year[2]. I am sure he would be happy to keep test-ipv6.com running without compromising it :) Very reputable, a great track record!
Tangential, but does anyone else struggle with their ISP implementing poor routing over IPv6 which results in packet loss? Mine does and I'm forced to use IPv4 which is behind CGNAT so that causes other issues but at least no lost packets.
The tier 2 support I've talked to has hot patched issues but then they re-surface a few weeks later.
In my particular case there seems to be an odd bug / misconfiguration from my side that makes the router / clients from time to time loose the IPv6 routing. The fallback is... a connection hanging forever. The only fix? Reconnecting to the Wi-Fi to get refresh the DHCP lease.
I debugged it for waay too long, and at this point I'm 80% convinced it's a Mikrotik bug of some sort.
I could not escalate this inside Globe Telecom (no way to reach engineers that understand what a "peering issue" is), and Level3 (the transit provider where all failed traceroutes were going through) did not respond to emails.
Thankfully, it's mostly fixed now - Level3 is no longer the last successful hop on any of the traceroutes. The only failing link is with Evoluhost, and the problem has been traced to a routing loop involving 2001:fe0:4775:1c0::1 inside Globe (that I have no way to complain about).
I haven't seen that, but I do regularly see different routing for v6 and v4, so it's not surprising that sometimes it's bad routing.
I also saw things were IPv4 was MTU 1500 and v6 was 1492 (presumably because it was 6rd and the network had a lot of PPPoE) and then ICMP needs frag was rate limited which would end up with lots of stalled communications. (It took me a long time to build it, but I have a v4/v6 mtu test site now http://pmtud.enslaves.us )
And then there's he.net tunnels which used to be pretty nice, but now get you flagged for captchas and I've seen periods of 300ms added latency, which I assume means they're being abused. I had to stop advertising the range on my lan because it caused more problems than any benefits.
If your ISP provides reasonable CPE and v6 is enabled by default, most consumer equipment will use it, and most of the high traffic sites are available via v6; I would expect poor v6 routing affects more of their customers than poor v4 routing.
If you are deploying a greenfield project in 2025 and you don’t bother setting up IPv6, you are failing. Also all internal virtual networks should by this point be IPv6 only or at least dual stack. The fact that we got unit testing to be the norm before IPv6 is negligent.
I can't see any advantages at all. I deployed it at home and in a few networks my company runs. We had nothing but stupid issues and zero benefit, and I was looking for them.
Basic stuff like getting automatically applied dynamic hostnames from the ISP fighting with whatever things are called internally wastes alot of time. I think most devices were getting 4 different addresses for various purposes and the devs had no idea which one they should be using.
I'm sure we were doing it wrong, or used the wrong gear, or whatever. But again, no discernable benefit to anyone involved. If we were located in a place with no IPv4 availability, probably a different story... but we don't. We turned it off except for a few networks that just provide client internet.
For my home network, I really tried. But in the end, after several times running into weird issues where some pages were working and others weren't, which were reliably resolved by turning off IPv6, I decided to leave the setting in the "Internet works" position.
I don't know what the issue was the last time, and I don't want to know. In particular, I don't want to have to know. When I open the tap, I expect clear, safe, drinking water, not having to debug why the pipe isn't working.
I'll call you the next time HE decides to stop routing ipv6 from europe to new york or when your corporate vpn is ipv4 only but your resolver is preferring AAAA records
IPv4 works. IPv6 often doesn't. I'd love to see a benefit in ipv6, I see no benefits at all, I can't run an ipv6 only network, so I have to run ipv4, and everything I need runs on ipv4, why do I need to double my workload to run ipv6 and ipv4.
My ipv6 only ssid at home sits idle other than a test vm because when I reach a problem I just move onto my ipv4 only ssid and everything works.
It's true that at this point future proofing demands it.
Is anyone happy about it in ipv4 land? No.
I just think it is ironic that the biggest use of ipv6 is cgnat, and it's what they crow about in ipv6 uptake, despite the fact ipv6 is religiously opposed to NATs.
Regular NATs you have control over with poking holes. Cgnat you are restricted to tail scale stuff.
Just spent the last 6 months delivering a code low deploy high platform / initiative for a government agency; v6 didn't make it on the requirements or nice to haves. Not a single user on the platform (so far) has said "oh I wish this was on IPv6".
The comment above was being downvoted quite a lot, and I'd quite like to know why. It seems reasonable to ensure that IPv6 works as a basic requirement for new projects (at least, ones which can be connected to a network).
my ISP gives me native v6 and a /56. I had sooo much trouble, I gave up and just disabled v6 in the kernel.
For example some sites might resolve a v6 address which is unreachable and the fallback takes ages. Some sites would resolve, connect but never load. Some must have been routing issues, etc. I'm not going to individually hunt down the issues, disabling is easier.
Agree 100%. There is no excuse other than "v6 addressing and subnetting is haaaard". It makes most things a lot easier than its v4 counterparts. I'd go so far as to say not deploying v6 is actively negligent.
Oh this hurts a lot. I don't know of a good alternative to this website. Other sites I've found either run fewer tests (so are less useful for debugging) or incorrectly claim I don't have IPv6 (I do?).
I don't suppose we can donate some money to keep this website up? Or perhaps some company like CloudFlare would like to host a mirror?
I am not the author, but can speak as someone who has kept a "seemingly simple" semi-popular web service online for many years with no/low maintenance: it often comes down to the fact that issues tend to pop up just when you don't have time to work on them. It is usually not a lot of maintenance, but it feels like a lot when you have to dive back in to something that you haven't thought about in months. It ends up being a source of very low level chronic stress.
I can totally see why shifts in other priorities would make it attractive to decommission.
Anyone have a good replacement if a different organization is not able to take over? This has always been my favorite IPv6 test site, and really appreciate the author maintaining it for so long.
Thanks for the service. I used it to figure out what's wrong with my ISP's ipv6 and even though I never figured it out a fix your website definitely helped a lot.
Side note: I find ipv6 complex and very difficult to use. Might be because of the poor experience with my ISP, but still...
> I am shutting the site down, with a target of "during winter break" (December) 2025.
there is an engineer somewhere out there who will get paged on christmas due to a hidden dependency on this site being up, heh. that old xkcd comic comes to mind.
That's karma for all the times the guy running that site had to deal with entitled emails.
I had my fair share of those as well - a bit over 2 decades ago I've added a CGI script to perform various DNS queries to my website - main purpose at that time was being able to show my customers DNS issues from their Windows boxes tied to corporate DNS.
Eventually some others added it to their documentation, with the most prominent one being OVH - they had a description on how to use my web site in various languages in their domain troubleshooting pages for many years.
I received a fair share of emails of people who were not able to figure out that I'm _not_ working for OVH, and I'm neither interested nor capable in solving their domain hosting issues with them.
They eventually built their own frontend, and by now it's mainly one guy from the Netherlands that now and then demands that I urgently add a new feature to the script.
[+] [-] jakebasile|5 months ago|reply
Thanks for the site for the last 15 years, it's helped me a number of times.
[+] [-] tgsovlerkhgsel|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] fotta|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] denysvitali|5 months ago|reply
Either way, a huge thank you from my side as well, this website has been (and still is) a very good troubleshooting tool to fix my IPv6 deployments
[+] [-] grishka|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] preisschild|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] goku12|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] shrink|5 months ago|reply
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=coderholic
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43256298
[+] [-] coderholic|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hypeatei|5 months ago|reply
The tier 2 support I've talked to has hot patched issues but then they re-surface a few weeks later.
[+] [-] denysvitali|5 months ago|reply
In my particular case there seems to be an odd bug / misconfiguration from my side that makes the router / clients from time to time loose the IPv6 routing. The fallback is... a connection hanging forever. The only fix? Reconnecting to the Wi-Fi to get refresh the DHCP lease.
I debugged it for waay too long, and at this point I'm 80% convinced it's a Mikrotik bug of some sort.
[+] [-] patrakov|5 months ago|reply
I could not escalate this inside Globe Telecom (no way to reach engineers that understand what a "peering issue" is), and Level3 (the transit provider where all failed traceroutes were going through) did not respond to emails.
Thankfully, it's mostly fixed now - Level3 is no longer the last successful hop on any of the traceroutes. The only failing link is with Evoluhost, and the problem has been traced to a routing loop involving 2001:fe0:4775:1c0::1 inside Globe (that I have no way to complain about).
Today's situation: https://i.ping.pe/j/9/img_j99kbqkn.png
[+] [-] brulard|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] toast0|5 months ago|reply
I also saw things were IPv4 was MTU 1500 and v6 was 1492 (presumably because it was 6rd and the network had a lot of PPPoE) and then ICMP needs frag was rate limited which would end up with lots of stalled communications. (It took me a long time to build it, but I have a v4/v6 mtu test site now http://pmtud.enslaves.us )
And then there's he.net tunnels which used to be pretty nice, but now get you flagged for captchas and I've seen periods of 300ms added latency, which I assume means they're being abused. I had to stop advertising the range on my lan because it caused more problems than any benefits.
If your ISP provides reasonable CPE and v6 is enabled by default, most consumer equipment will use it, and most of the high traffic sites are available via v6; I would expect poor v6 routing affects more of their customers than poor v4 routing.
[+] [-] nzeid|5 months ago|reply
If you are using 24.0 or 24.1 of OpenWRT, there is a catastrophic bug affecting IPv6 throughput. Most recent version fixes it.
[+] [-] extr0pian|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jowea|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jenders|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] section_me|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] IgorPartola|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|5 months ago|reply
Basic stuff like getting automatically applied dynamic hostnames from the ISP fighting with whatever things are called internally wastes alot of time. I think most devices were getting 4 different addresses for various purposes and the devs had no idea which one they should be using.
I'm sure we were doing it wrong, or used the wrong gear, or whatever. But again, no discernable benefit to anyone involved. If we were located in a place with no IPv4 availability, probably a different story... but we don't. We turned it off except for a few networks that just provide client internet.
[+] [-] tgsovlerkhgsel|5 months ago|reply
I don't know what the issue was the last time, and I don't want to know. In particular, I don't want to have to know. When I open the tap, I expect clear, safe, drinking water, not having to debug why the pipe isn't working.
[+] [-] liveoneggs|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ktosobcy|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ta1243|5 months ago|reply
IPv4 works. IPv6 often doesn't. I'd love to see a benefit in ipv6, I see no benefits at all, I can't run an ipv6 only network, so I have to run ipv4, and everything I need runs on ipv4, why do I need to double my workload to run ipv6 and ipv4.
My ipv6 only ssid at home sits idle other than a test vm because when I reach a problem I just move onto my ipv4 only ssid and everything works.
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|5 months ago|reply
Is anyone happy about it in ipv4 land? No.
I just think it is ironic that the biggest use of ipv6 is cgnat, and it's what they crow about in ipv6 uptake, despite the fact ipv6 is religiously opposed to NATs.
Regular NATs you have control over with poking holes. Cgnat you are restricted to tail scale stuff.
[+] [-] commandersaki|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rwmj|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] _zoltan_|5 months ago|reply
For example some sites might resolve a v6 address which is unreachable and the fallback takes ages. Some sites would resolve, connect but never load. Some must have been routing issues, etc. I'm not going to individually hunt down the issues, disabling is easier.
[+] [-] theideaofcoffee|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] uyzstvqs|5 months ago|reply
https://ipv6test.google.com/
[+] [-] fodkodrasz|5 months ago|reply
What does this mean at all? I went tot he page for info on my IPv6 connectivity, not a politician's campaign doublespeak.
[+] [-] perryizgr8|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelcampbell|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] preisschild|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] zb3|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] omoikane|5 months ago|reply
https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
[+] [-] epx|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ancarda|5 months ago|reply
I don't suppose we can donate some money to keep this website up? Or perhaps some company like CloudFlare would like to host a mirror?
[+] [-] scrollaway|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] alberth|5 months ago|reply
I’ve used it for years and find it incredibly useful (& am appreciative of its existence) - just didn’t realize it needed much upkeep.
[+] [-] tylervigen|5 months ago|reply
I can totally see why shifts in other priorities would make it attractive to decommission.
[+] [-] inickt|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pooyamo|5 months ago|reply
If one is able to get a public IPv6 from a public IP finder service, I guess that means his machine is able to access the IPv6 internet.
Some finders report ISP too (use -r).Also, kudos to jfesler for his works on maintaining the website through the years.
[1]: https://github.com/pvonmoradi/netq
[+] [-] kwar13|5 months ago|reply
Side note: I find ipv6 complex and very difficult to use. Might be because of the poor experience with my ISP, but still...
[+] [-] lazystar|5 months ago|reply
there is an engineer somewhere out there who will get paged on christmas due to a hidden dependency on this site being up, heh. that old xkcd comic comes to mind.
[+] [-] finaard|5 months ago|reply
I had my fair share of those as well - a bit over 2 decades ago I've added a CGI script to perform various DNS queries to my website - main purpose at that time was being able to show my customers DNS issues from their Windows boxes tied to corporate DNS.
Eventually some others added it to their documentation, with the most prominent one being OVH - they had a description on how to use my web site in various languages in their domain troubleshooting pages for many years.
I received a fair share of emails of people who were not able to figure out that I'm _not_ working for OVH, and I'm neither interested nor capable in solving their domain hosting issues with them.
They eventually built their own frontend, and by now it's mainly one guy from the Netherlands that now and then demands that I urgently add a new feature to the script.
[+] [-] kingstnap|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Phelinofist|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] reassess_blind|5 months ago|reply