On 2017-06-06 SixXS performed a sunset. This website is a static edition of the SixXS website. Please read the Sunsetting SixXS page for more details.

SixXS IPv6-IPv4 and IPv4-IPv6 Website Gateway/Proxy

Welcome to the portal for the SixXS SixXS IPv6-IPv4 and IPv4-IPv6 Website Gateway/Proxy.

This portal gives IPv6 capable http-clients access to IPv4-only websites and IPv4 capable http-clients access to IPv6-only websites. It thus acts as a Web Proxy between IPv4-IPv6 and IPv6-IPv4.

Note: This service is governed by an Acceptable Usage Policy

With a few gateway-side tricks all the external hosts on the websites get .sixxs.org or ipv6.sixxs.org (IPv6 to IPv4) or ipv4.sixxs.org (IPv4 to IPv6) added to their hostname thus furter queries will end up going through the gateway.

The visited websites will find the following User-Agent in their logs:

IPv6 to IPv4 Gateway: SixXS-IPv6Gate/4.2 (IPv6 to IPv4 Gateway; https://www.sixxs.net/tools/gateway/; info@sixxs.net)

IPv4 to IPv6 Gateway: SixXS-IPv6Gate/4.2 (IPv4 to IPv6 Gateway; https://www.sixxs.net/tools/gateway/; info@sixxs.net)

The original User-Agent string is prepended. Note that according to RFC2068 appending the original User-Agent should work, but because some websites only check the first token, we had to append it.

When they get enough hits they might be hinted that IPv6 use is rising and maybe we can pursuade them this way to start making their websites natively IPv6 accessible.

How to use the IPv6Gate

Append ".sixxs.org" or ".ipv6.sixxs.org" to the hostname of the website you want to visit.

Examples:



How to use the IPv4Gate

Append ".ipv4.sixxs.org" to the hostname of the website you want to visit.

Examples:



Any other site: http://

For whom is this service?

The IPv6Gate service is available for all IPv6 capable HTTP/1.1 (+) clients.

The IPv4Gate service is available for all IPv4 capable HTTP/1.1 (+) clients.



What is SixXS?

SixXS is a so called IPv6 Access Provider. We make it possible for ISPs to enable their clients to access the IPv6 internet using IPv4 in IPv6 tunnels, thus avoiding upgrading the infrastructure between the client and the ISP. More detailed information is available from the main SixXS website. The IPv6Gate is an extra service to help IPv6 deployment.

Why does this service exist?

There appears to be a chicken and egg problem in deploying IPv6; ISPs serving endusers don't want to do it yet because there isn't any need for it from their clients, Hosting companies don't do it yet because there isn't any demand yet either from clients. Clients don't need it because there isn't any content and thus there isn't any need for the hosting nor the ISPs to do it. Thus, we made this gateway, which allows users who do have IPv6 to get to all the content in the IPv4 world. If you don't have IPv6 connectivity (yet) you can of course try the SixXS Tunnel Broker.

But my ISP doesn't provide IPv6 yet!

You could either pursuade your ISP to support it or get them to install a SixXS PoP or you could setup a tunnel to one of the public SixXS PoPs as SixXS is a Tunnel Broker.

But my computer doesn't do IPv6 yet!

Check out the SixXS FAQs where there are numerous examples for most common Operating Systems on how to configure IPv6 support. SixXS is a Tunnel Broker which can provide you with IPv6 connectivity even if you only have IPv4 now.

I do not wish to be proxied via IPv6Gate. What now?

It is trivial to remove traffic at your webserver - the proxy uses a custom User-Agent header, and it sets the Via: header, both of which can be used to block the traffic at serverside.

In addition to this, mostly for website operators who do not understand how to filter, we maintain a manual blacklist at our NGINX frontends. Mail abuse@sixxs.net if you operate a website and wish to be included in the blacklist. Sites that are blocked return a HTTP 451 error page with the title 'Requested site is blacklisted' pointing to this article.

This block list only contains one entry at the moment: Facebook. This as their monitoring tools search for fake Facebook login pages, and they complained that IPv6Gate was trying to MITM Facebook. Hence, on their request, we added them to the block list.

My BitTorrent client does not work through IPv6Gate!

As per our AUP we explicitly block Torrent clients and BitTorrent requests ('/announce' and '/scrape') as these are made by incomplete HTTP clients that have been hammering on our servers overloading them by doing repeatitive useless queries.

We have thus decided to block these requests so that real users can use our IPv6Gate service properly. Requests that are banned this way will receive a 402 HTTP error with an informational page pointing at our AUP.

Note that the websites of various trackers (for instance Debian CD BitTorrent and Ubuntu alternative downloads) are not affected as these are real HTTP websites.

Can I pick the country where my exit point is?

Yes, but only in part, this is because our webfrontends do loadbalancing and failover between themselves. Generally your request will be served from the frontend that you connect to, but there might be failover to other nodes. To use this feature one can use the following construction of URL.

Normal IPv6Gate URL Cluster-specific IPv6Gate URL Description http://www.example.com.ipv4.sixxs.org http://www.example.com.ie4.sixxs.org Access an IPv6 website over IPv4 using the Irish cluster http://www.example.com.ipv6.sixxs.org http://www.example.com.ie6.sixxs.org Access an IPv4 website over IPv6 using the Irish cluster http://www.example.com.ipv4.sixxs.org http://www.example.com.nl4.sixxs.org Access an IPv6 website over IPv4 using the Dutch cluster http://www.example.com.ipv6.sixxs.org http://www.example.com.nl6.sixxs.org Access an IPv4 website over IPv6 using the Dutch cluster

Contact information

See the SixXS contact pages.

Short notes

Some additional notes concerning this service:

IPv6Gate: Sites having a AAAA (IPv6) DNS record are redirected to the native variant.

Some javascripted URL's don't get rewritten correctly as we are unable to execute the javascript and thus figure out the URL.

/robots.txt is hardcoded for every gatewayed site to disallow robots from mirroring any content, this avoids gatewayed sites to become listed in eg Google.

The real (your) client IP is passed in the X-Forwarded-For HTTP header just like normal gateways/proxies, additionally we add your IP address in the Via and User-Agent headers, you thus do not become anonymous using this service.

Logs are kept of accesses and will be used for statistical reasons, the following Apache 2 log line is used:

LogFormat "%{X-IPv6Gate-Original-URL}o %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b" ipv6gate

Except for the above no further information (cookies, post values, headers, etc) are stored or logged, nevertheless in case of abnormal usage, access to the gateway will be denied and we will cooperate with inquiries from authorities.

Except for the above no further information (cookies, post values, headers, etc) are stored or logged, nevertheless in case of abnormal usage, access to the gateway will be denied and we will cooperate with inquiries from authorities. Don't use automated tools in combination with this gateway, thus no torrenting, spidering or RSS feed reading.

IPv6Gate: The gateway works only with an IPv6 host as a client, thus not for IPv4 hosts.

IPv4Gate: The gateway works only with an IPv4 host as a client, thus not for IPv6 hosts.

Only port 80 (default HTTP port) is supported, as such no SSL (HTTPS) support on port 443.

For www.google.com.sixxs.org use Google Prefs to set a correct cookie so the site doesn't appear in Dutch (or the locale of the gateway that you are using), as Google figures out that would be the language of the user based on source-IP, not on the Language setting in your browser, a similar solution might apply to other sites who try to detect the language based on the country of origin.

Domains of cookies are rewritten causing logins/sessions to sites like Slashdot to work.

Request/content caching is active in similar vain to regular proxies, as such for changing data proper expiration and cache headers are needed.

Contact information for this gateway can be found on the SixXS Contact pages.

Gateway Error Codes

The following table shows the custom error codes that the IPv6Gate can return. IPv6Gate error pages have the SixXS styling and a small description about the error. Note that upstream (origin site) errors are returned directly too.