boberonicus

I recently returned from an AirBNB stay. The AP was actually a repeater of some other home's network connection, and it wasn't particularly stable. But the most interesting thing was that while Android devices configured their v4 address properly via DHCP, my MacBook Pro running El Capitan (10.11.5) wasn't working well.

I figured out that I was getting an IPv6 address. So I could connect to native v6 sites (Facebook, Google, etc.) But the majority of sites that I visit aren't ready to accept a native v6 connection, so I'd get an error.

To get around this, I configured DHCP and DNS manually on my laptop, which worked fine. The question is: what should I have done? Or was the AP misconfigured?

tmiw

I'm not sure about Chrome or Firefox but Safari in OSX/macOS is supposed to automatically try to connect via IPv4 if IPv6 doesn't connect immediately. In theory, as long as your laptop was set up to use DHCP stuff should have worked transparently. I could see misconfigured DNS causing issues though; did you force it to be a specific address (e.g. 8.8.8.8 for Google's)?

gfunkdave

Sounds like a misconfigured laptop. The web browser doesn't choose IPv4 or v6. It just passes a network request to the operating system, and the operating system figures out how to handle it.

The normal behavior (in Windows, at least) is to try IPv6 first and then fall back to 4 if it doesn't work. Or is it to try them both and use the faster one? I forget.

tmiw

It sounds like it's browser-dependent to some degree if Wikipedia is to be believed. In any case, it's usually "try them both and use the faster one" based on what most people run today.

boberonicus

Yeah, this was a networking problem, I didn't intend to imply that this was browser related. I guessed that it was a client config problem. There are OSX command line settings to disable v6 and force v4 only but I figured if I did that I'd be posting two years from now wondering why v6 wasn't working!

Ditto

I have the same problem at home sometimes, while I have a very functioning IPv6 via tunnelbroker.net, and I can happily go to Facebook, youtube and even stream Netflix over it (at least until they recently started with all their proxy blocking things), I could not access several sites over it.

I could access those sites with no issues via another provider IPv6, so clearly those websites are configured properly.

Sad as it may be, it seems like IPv6 connectivity is still broken in many places.

tmiw

The weird thing about Netflix is that I thought they used AWS, which IIRC is still IPv4-only. I wonder if the proxy checking is something they're doing in their Silverlight plugin vs. a simple IP range block on their end. I'll have to see if I get the same error on my Apple TV at some point.

Ditto

Netflix is dual stacked, and both IPv4 and IPv6 works very well.
They seem to be doing a simple IP range check on their end, and for some reason, even though a whois to Hurricane Electric server will return my correct location, which is the same as where my IPv4 address is, they keep insisting I now use a proxy/vpn if I am dual stacked (as they identify the IPv6 address as being a US based one), I have this issue both with my mac and my ChromeCast, no issues whatsoever with my IPv4 only Smart TV, or if I disable IPv6 on my router.

docbert

AWS supports IPv6 for certain services, and has for many years. And of course, if you're Netflix then what they support publicly probably isn't all that important...

This is very much deliberate. NetFlix have been on a push to outlaw people using proxies to access services outside of their real country. One of the (previously) easy and free ways to do that was to route via a free HE IPv6 tunnel. As a result, all tunnel addresses, and some other non-tunnel HE addresses are now blocked as proxies.

Let me guess - one of those sites is www.cogentco.com?

Unfortunately there are still a few land battles going on around IPv6, with the biggest being between Hurricane Electric (who run tunnelbroker.net) and Cogent Communications. As a result, you can't get from one of those to the other. Thus any service that is hosted only on Cogent will not be accessible from HE over IPv6.

Ditto

I'm not trying to access any content outside my real country, my free HE IPv6 tunnel ends in the same country as I am in, and HE list those addresses in the same country as well, yet Netflix decides to block them.

They also block the IPv4 addresses used by a server I have hosted in a DC in the same country, so I cannot watch anything if I am at a public location and VPN'd into it.

On the contrary, I can be anywhere in the world and VPN into my home router and see content from a different country, which I shouldn't be allowed to.

So I get what they are trying to do, but clearly it has a very different impact.

Actually, I haven't even tried Cogent, I know of this long going battle, I don't have any recent examples, but it was not for content hosted on Cogent.