IPv6 stuff has started biting me at work. Symantec's SEP has a bunch of poorly-described rules blocking various IPv6 things in their firewall that caused me a few hours of heartburn over a couple of weeks when I was unable to reach various web sites that worked fine on my phone.

It's not uncommon for parts of websites to claim to be IPv6 compliant while other parts aren't. So one could connect to, say, their e-commerce page but their home page would time out. (Apparently if the IPv6 stuff isn't present, Winders will somehow fallback to IPv4, but if the site claims IPv6 works but it's not fully configured then Winders will not do that and things will fail.)

http://test-ipv6.com/

http://ipv6-test.com/validate.php

I discovered a simple way to test if a firewall is causing problems by accident.

ping -6 www.google.com

will give a "General Failure" if IPv6 is setup and is being blocked by a firewall. While

ping -4 www.google.com

will work (using IPv4).

If/when IPv4 is turned off, there would seem to be a Y2K-like level of panic while home users and mom-and-pop web sites rush to get compliant. Probably a lot less money available to fix things, though.

:-/

Anyway, good sleuthing, Greg! Here's hoping you don't have to do that again for a while!

Cheers,
Scott.