A Word of Warning about IPv6...Don't be me lol

[gobabushka]

So, I setup a MDD G4 1.42 to do some VHS video capture in my shop, and some general PPC mac fun. The system was working beautifully, and then it wasn't To make a long story short, the system started freezing completely. I tried everything, reseated everything, cleaned ALL the contacts (managed to kill the CPU card somehow in the process

Then I brought My PG G4 Aluminium to the shop. A system that runs amazingly. It started to do the same thing right from the start. After some serious diagnostic and reinstalls thinking maybe i installed something on both systems they didn't like...I figured out the problem...a week later.

Tiger doesn't like the IPv6 implementation on modern Charter/Spectrum routers. Turned it off, no problems since.
So...one day I'll get another dual 1.42 for my G4 or I'll figure out whats wrong with mine. For now, I found a decent deal on a base model 1.6 PM G5 that seems to fit the bill.

I just wanted to help someone avoid a week of frustration like I had hopefully. If this is common knowledge, I apologize. It took ALOT of googling for me to find the solution.

 

[3lectr1cPPC]

I may be ignorant on this - does the eventual death of IPv4 mean the death of getting online (conventionally at least) on vintage hardware? When did OSs start supporting IPv6 properly?

 

[NJRoadfan]

All versions of MacOS X should support IPv6. On the PC side, Windows XP came with experiemental support, with Vista being the first version with proper IPv6 built-in. Old computers with only IPv4 will have to resort to proxy style solutions. There were some RFCs for such gateways (NAT-PT), but they have been mostly abandoned.

Just keep in mind that most ISPs that are "IPv6 only" still implement IPv4 using carrier grade NAT so older computers will generally work fine. You only have a fully routable public IPv6 address in those cases.

 

[3lectr1cPPC]

Good to know! Thanks for the great explanation.

 

[Snial]

I may be ignorant on this - does the eventual death of IPv4 mean the death of getting online (conventionally at least) on vintage hardware? When did OSs start supporting IPv6 properly?

I was doing some contract work for Symbian, who developed the OS (SymbianOS) for the Nokia Smart Phones in the early 2000s. It supported IPv6 from about 2002, I did the ARP and DHCP implementation. In many respects IPv6 is simpler than IPv4, so it was perfectly possible to implement it on mobile platforms with single-digit MB of storage.

Symbian - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[lobust]

This is probably the root of the issue I had with my Cube: https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/g4-cube-becomes-unstable-when-ethernet-is-connected.38641/

I had assumed that it was a hardware level incompatibility, but ipv6 also makes sense as the router would have been set to prefer ipv6 while the cheap bridge is very likely ipv4 only.

Interesting!

 

[cheesestraws]

A lot of plastic end-user routers make bad assumptions about what might be plugged into them, and generally do not play nicely if you go outside of those assumptions.

When you say turn it off, do you mean at the router or at the computer? If the former, have you tried blocking all IPv6 traffic using ipfw on the Tiger machine? I can't remember the magical incantation, but you have a pretty decent set of firewall controls.

 

[gobabushka]

A lot of plastic end-user routers make bad assumptions about what might be plugged into them, and generally do not play nicely if you go outside of those assumptions.

When you say turn it off, do you mean at the router or at the computer? If the former, have you tried blocking all IPv6 traffic using ipfw on the Tiger machine? I can't remember the magical incantation, but you have a pretty decent set of firewall controls.

Turn it off on the computer. I found it when my PB G4 would run fine during setup, but crash right after I connected airport. I found an article somewhere, possibly here, that said what the issue was and how to fix it.

 

[gobabushka]

Good to know! Thanks for the great explanation.

Thank you!

 

[Quadraman]

Does Leopard support ipv6 better than Tiger does? That might be your solution, if it does.

 

[GondolinOnMyMind]

I may be ignorant on this - does the eventual death of IPv4 mean the death of getting online (conventionally at least) on vintage hardware? When did OSs start supporting IPv6 properly?

Like Mark Twain said, reports of IPv4's death are a great exaggeration. IPv4 is not going away in anytime soon. Address space may be exhausted but the protocol itself is so deeply in modern internet that replacing it with IPv6 (or any other version or protocol) is not going to happen in the lifetime of these devices. Or at least I am not going to witness it.