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IPv6 Day and Mac Users?

G

Glumpfner

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 15, 2009
121
1
So I read every where about the IPv6 day coming up in june, and every where it says that mac users will most likely have trouble and wont be able to use the internet.

Is that true?
Isn't my router suppose to take care of all IPv4/IPv6 protocols for WAN connections anyways? Why would that affect me then.

And why would mac users have that problem in the first place?
 
OS X supports IPv6 natively; I've used it without any trouble whatsoever. I don't know about this "IPv6 Day" but I can't imagine anything breaking as most people will still be using IPv4 anyway.
 
Apparently it has to do with the parallel protocol of IPv4/IPv6 which Mac's have problem with and not IPv6 alone.

I have read about it on many news websites, most comments slagging macs of course that they won't be able to handle the IPv6 day.

I just don't understand why it would affect Mac users, since that has nothing to do with the end machine, but rather the router which the computer is connected to.
 
Glumpfner said:
Apparently it has to do with the parallel protocol of IPv4/IPv6 which Mac's have problem with and not IPv6 alone.

I have read about it on many news websites, most comments slagging macs of course that they won't be able to handle the IPv6 day.

I just don't understand why it would affect Mac users, since that has nothing to do with the end machine, but rather the router which the computer is connected to.
Click to expand...

Whatever you read is incorrect. As others have stated IPV6 is natively supported.

Also if you want to check on your mac go to "System Preferences" -> "Network" -> "Advanced" -> "TCP/IP" and you will see the option for IPv6.
 
Glumpfner said:
Apparently it has to do with the parallel protocol of IPv4/IPv6 which Mac's have problem with and not IPv6 alone.

I have read about it on many news websites, most comments slagging macs of course that they won't be able to handle the IPv6 day.

I just don't understand why it would affect Mac users, since that has nothing to do with the end machine, but rather the router which the computer is connected to.
Click to expand...

You are ready n00bs that haven't used Macs ever and are just parroting Windows Trolls. As others have said Macs have supported IPv6 since OS X came out.
 
Glumpfner said:
So I read every where about the IPv6 day coming up in june, and every where it says that mac users will most likely have trouble and wont be able to use the internet.

Is that true?
Isn't my router suppose to take care of all IPv4/IPv6 protocols for WAN connections anyways? Why would that affect me then.

And why would mac users have that problem in the first place?
Click to expand...

I run IPv4 and IPv6 on my home network now and my Macs have absolutely no problem going to both IPv4 and IPv6 sites on the Internet (not that there are that many v6-only sites). My iPad and iPhone also work fine going to both v4 and v6 sites.

I doubt any consumer grade routers are doing any v4/v6 translation, so they won't take care of connections on their own.
 
chrono1081 said:
Whatever you read is incorrect. As others have stated IPV6 is natively supported.
Click to expand...
But not everything. Macs do not have any DHCPv6 support, other operating systems do. This is the only complaint about the IPv6 implementation in OS X. Others are about how well OS X and iOS support IPv6 (iOS doesn't seem to have some sort of GUI to show the IPv6 config though).

There's also the problem of 6-to-4. Maybe that's what (s)he has been reading about (which sucks in any OS).

Nothing wrong with my IPv4 internet connection and IPv6 tunnel from HE.
 
Your ISP almost certainly doesn't support IPV6 yet. Only a handful do.

Even so, you can (and will) participate in the test, either voluntarily or involuntarily. ;)

Participating sites will turn-on IPV6 support for a day. They will support BOTH IPV4 and IPV6 connections.

You can test whether you can reach these sites via IPV6 if your ISP supports IPV6 and your computer and router support IPV6, or if you use a "tunnel broker" to tunnel traffic over your ISP's IPV4-only connection.

You WILL test whether you can reach these sites via IPV4 if your computer, router, or ISP support IPV4 only.

There are apparently some potential issues revolving around DNS for IPV4-only users. Initial access to sites could be significantly delayed by the DNS lookup.

I think the test is really more for the latter than for the former. It's to find out "will turning on IPV6 sites break IPV4 access"?

Not sure how important DHCPV6 is. My understanding is that IPV6 really doesn't have a need for DHCP, since there is no NAT (no need for NAT, given the large address space), every IPV6 device has a default globally-unique address, and so is self-configuring. DHCPV6 exists primarily to allow network administrators control over addressing within their organization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DHCPv6
 
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The autoconfiguration in IPv6 gives you little control. DHCPv6 gives you full control. One of the things you can only do with DHCPv6 is tell clients which DNS server(s) to use. A lot of networks will going to have this so it is crucial to have a DHCPv6 client on board (which OS X/iOS do not have).
 
Okay before people here continue saying that IPv6 works on Mac.... yes, I know that, everybody knows that! But that is not the problem here.

The problem seems to be that when IPv6 and IPv4 are active at the same time, and IPv6 times out for what ever reason, the fallback to IPv4 will take up to 75 seconds on a Mac!

Those details have been released by Google in a 24 Pages long PDF document. Read it for yourself. http://ripe62.ripe.net/presentations/71-World-IPv6-Day-and-home-networks.pdf

The News originally came from one of the most respected IT News websites
http://www.heise.de/netze/meldung/Welttag-IPv6-ein-Tag-lang-ohne-Google-Yahoo-Facebook-1239631.html (English version here)

About the IPv6 World day, go here: http://isoc.org/wp/worldipv6day/
Even they refer to Heise.de, since they were the first major website to launch IPv6 support, next to IPv4.

Bottom line: Several analysts said that on the world ipv6 days (June 8. 2011), Mac Users, as well as some users of certain Linux distribution should get ready to work a day without FaceBook, Google, YouTube ,Yahoo etc.

If that news would come from some blogs, I wouldn't pay attention, but Google, Heise and other respected analytics came up with that result about Mac/Linux users.
And I am still very surprised that this news has not made it on to any Mac website yet.
 
Windows will take 20 seconds, OS X will take 4 or 75 seconds, Linux will be instant or take up to 3 minutes. In other words: every single main stream OS has problems with IPv4 fallback but the slowness differs. This will only be a problem when something can not be reached with IPv6.

The World IPv6 Day is not a day to show off IPv6. It is actually a day to see what problems we run into when we switch to IPv6. There are some experiences with small scale tests but there aren't any on a large scale. That is the entire purpose of the World IPv6 Day. It isn't called Test Drive Day for nothing ;)

That puts everything in a completely different perspective. With the World IPv6 Day we can see if it really is a problem and how big (or small). That allows manufacturers and software developers to improve IPv6 support in their hardware AND software (the latter is also a big problem since there aren't that many applications that are able to work properly with IPv6).
 
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