Apple breaks IPv6 even more with new Mac OS X patch

Emil

Posts: 152   +0

While the rest of the Internet is grudgingly moving to IPv6, Apple has actually regressed support with its latest Snow Leopard patch. Cupertino has actually been doing quite well to help the world move to IPv6, so it's rather disappointing to see this change.

The recently released Snow Leopard 10.6.5 update is not doing anyone any good, according to Ars Technica. While Snow Leopard will still try to connect over IPv6 first, for IPv6 destinations that are reachable over 6to4 it will choose IPv4 instead. In other words, the OS will only connect over 6to4 to IPv6 destinations if there's no IPv4. Apple argues that 6to4 technology is responsible for many non-working IPv6 setups.

In Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, Apple introduced IPv6 support which preferred IPv6 over IPv4 if it had a choice. It used 6to4 technology, an automatic tunneling mechanism where IPv6 packets are put inside IPv4 packets. That means users of ISPs that don't support IPv6 yet can still connect to the IPv6 Internet. It looks like Apple has reversed course, and decided to ignore transition technology, opting to wait for an IPv6 world. Hopefully the company will change its decision in a later release.

Permalink to story.

 
Why all the negative reports on Apple?

No mention of exFAT support rolled out for ALL Macs in 10.6.5. Sure its not a big deal, but this being a news article on TS actually affects probably 0.1% of the readers at most.

There has also been a lot reported here about Apple and Adobe, especially the decision to not include Flash (even though it isn't included in Windows.....). The recent OS X update addressed 134 security vulnerabilities. Fourty-One percent of those vulnerabilities were attributable to Flash, no wonder Apple dropped it. They don't want to spend nearly half of their OS updates addressing Adobe's vulnerabilities!
 
Why all the negative reports on Apple?

No mention of exFAT support rolled out for ALL Macs in 10.6.5. Sure its not a big deal, but this being a news article on TS actually affects probably 0.1% of the readers at most.

There has also been a lot reported here about Apple and Adobe, especially the decision to not include Flash (even though it isn't included in Windows.....). The recent OS X update addressed 134 security vulnerabilities. Fourty-One percent of those vulnerabilities were attributable to Flash, no wonder Apple dropped it. They don't want to spend nearly half of their OS updates addressing Adobe's vulnerabilities!

1. It's fun to read about Apples shortcomings because they have their "holier than thou" attitude and make outlandish claims like, "Macs are more secure than PC's'".

2. In your own words, "its not a big deal".

3. Refer to answer #1
 
So other than some stereotypical (maybe made up?) Apple fans having some "holier than thou attitude" you had nothing?

"2" of mine wasn't intended as an argument, but more of a point of 'why create news stories that pertain to such a tiny percentage of your audience?' but I think you answered that in your first point. It gets traffic from the Apple haters, which makes the site money.
 
This 'breakage' only applies to 6to4, which to this point has been the main reason Google and others have not been willing to enable A and AAAA records to its primary domains without whitelisting [http://google.com/ipv6/]. This patch has the potential to bring the observed broken IPv6 hosts down to a level site administers may be happy to 'sacrifice' to actually push dual stack to their primary websites.

2 days in, over 10% of the broken systems have been upgraded.

Check details/numbers here: http://www.fud.no/ipv6/
 
I think SNGX's remarks do carry weightage in specifically technical aspect of this story, which I interpret as a non issue for now, because IPv6 connectivity is the future but it isn't here yet.

@SNGX
I think Apple get lots of bad press mainly because it acts like a 'control freak'.
 
Oh yeah, forgot about the new OSX patch, I'll have to go and update my mums Mac because lord knows she wouldn't have a clue how to do that :D
 
Isn't the slogan "It just works"? Should be starred with "unless you want IPv6".

Whatever happened to defaults?!? Should be able to at least choose - how else is IPv6 going to get traction in time?
 
Per, we could never know since the allocation of ip address have grown quite a lot.

I do however always enjoy as much as the next guy, some crap over apple =)
 
The same as always, Apple and tehir own little world that just accep thing if they are not hitting their faces!.
 
Thanks Per & limp.

But my comment never discounted that future 'isn't some time near'. So it can be upon us soon as Per have pointed out. Anyway, it will happen when it will happen, beside I'm on Win7 so I am not worried ;)
 
SNGX1275 said:
No mention of exFAT support rolled out for ALL Macs in 10.6.5.

So congrats apple on finally adding in support for technology that has been around for over 2 years?
 
and here we see anther example of apple being "a pain in the ***" again.
let's just hope that there is a backup plan for the internet besides ipv6.
 
puiu said:
and here we see anther example of apple being "a pain in the ***" again.
let's just hope that there is a backup plan for the internet besides ipv6.
And what would that backup plan sound like? ipv7?
 
Apple should be praised for fixing this bug, not ridiculed. Their previous defaults were causing serious problems for IPv6 deployment. Opera used to have a similar issue, but they fixed it earlier this year.

This site has graphs and other details:
http://www.fud.no/ipv6/#osx
 
Nice one Apple! IPv6 is needed as IPv4 is running out. It doesn't matter so much for internal networks, but if you wanted to network Windows 7 and Mac's, then this could cause problems to the standard users as Windows 7 defaults to IPv6! Yet again "Quality" coding from Apple!
 
Why does apple always do things like this. They are forcing people to stick with the old technology. They don't even support Blu-Ray which I think sucks. They should do good to their customers. Hopefully they will release an update later on which will reinstate support for IPv6
 
but as our home LAN routers could never fill the class C 10.x.y.z address range, IPv6 is meaningless (and frequently an inhibitor) to the home user.

My networking knowledge is nowhere near as good as yours, but are you saying that right now, domestic use routers aren't capable of connecting to IPv6 addresses?

I'd be curious to know more about this if you have any good links worth a read please?


@the OP...
You sure love to bash Apple. Did someone drop a imac on you as a child or something?!?
 
Leeky; yea, most home routers older than a year, and infact most new ones today don't support an internet facing IPv6 address.
If your router is supported by dd-wrt you could install that and be merrily on your way though (voiding the routers warranty in the process of course) www.dd-wrt.com

jobeard; IPv6 is meaningless for internal networks yes, but when your internet facing router can no longer get an IPv4 address (because your ISP has run out of their allocated IPv4 address space) then it wont really matter if you think it is meaningful or not, because you wont get on the Internet otherwise :)
 
Leeky; yea, most home routers older than a year, and infact most new ones today don't support an internet facing IPv6 address.
If your router is supported by dd-wrt you could install that and be merrily on your way though (voiding the routers warranty in the process of course) www.dd-wrt.com

Thats OK then, my DIR615 supports that, and I even had it running it once, but wireless was a bit of an issue so I reverted back to the OEM D-Link install.

I've been considering a gigabit router for a while now anyway, so I'll purchase when the time comes I think - I'll make sure it can work with dd-wrt first though!

jobeard; IPv6 is meaningless for internal networks yes, but when your internet facing router can no longer get an IPv4 address (because your ISP has run out of their allocated IPv4 address space) then it wont really matter if you think it is meaningful or not, because you wont get on the Internet otherwise :)

That sounds like a lot of people are going to suffer with this. That said I presume all existing IPv4 internet addresses currently used by webservers would still be OK to use, and it would just be "new" allocations of the IPv6 addresses that would be unreachable for those unlucky people without support for IPv6 addresses on their routers?
 
Leeky; A native IPv6 machine can not even do a DNS lookup against a IPv4 machine, let alone speak to it. (And vice versa)
Thankfully there is specification for a IPv6 > IPv4 protocol (6to4) which goes around this issue...

Windows Vista and Windows 7 by default uses this, in XP you can manually install IPv6
Windows Vista and 7 even defaults to using IPv6, and they also setup a IPv4 > IPv6 (4to6) tunnel to Microsoft.com, this means that if a site supports IPv6 you will access it automagically via IPv6.
Even if your internet facing router is only on IPv4
Check your address allocations with ipconfig /all, there should be this section "Tunnel adapter Teredo Tunneling Pseudo-Interface"

You can also just try pinging an ipv6 enabled site, like so;
ping -6 ipv6.google.com
 
jobeard; IPv6 is meaningless for internal networks yes, but when your internet facing router can no longer get an IPv4 address (because your ISP has run out of their allocated IPv4 address space) then it wont really matter if you think it is meaningful or not, because you wont get on the Internet otherwise :)
a) the ISP does not need to serve you a DHCP-IPv6 address.
b) if our gateway router WAN side is IPv6, there's no requirement for the LAN side to be a leming; the router can do 6to4 internally.
c) some current routers do so poorly with IPv6, that the need replacement OR our systems need to disable IPv6 (Vista+Win/7)

Just google for the issues - - it's amazing
 
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