• Open Menu Close Menu
  • Apple
  • Shopping Bag
  • Apple
  • Mac
  • iPad
  • iPhone
  • Watch
  • TV
  • Music
  • Support
  • Search apple.com
  • Shopping Bag

Lists

Open Menu Close Menu
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Lists hosted on this site
  • Email the Postmaster
  • Tips for posting to public mailing lists
Supported IPv6 standards on MacOS X?
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Supported IPv6 standards on MacOS X?


  • Subject: Supported IPv6 standards on MacOS X?
  • From: Mohacsi Janos <email@hidden>
  • Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:48:43 +0100 (CET)

Dear All,
I did not find any information what IPv6 standards are supported on the Mac OS X.
Can you list it somewhere?


I found some information that it is based on KAME:

norfolk:~ mohacsi$ sysctl -a |grep -i kame
net.inet6.ip6.kame_version: 20010528/apple-darwin

However I found some serious deficiencies in the IPv6 implementation of Mac OS X. The biggest problem I found RFC 3484 (Default Address Selection for IPv6). This is part of all the modern *BSD systems (e.g. since FreeBSD 5.x)

It is very important to have default address selection implemented on Mac OS X.

1. US federal IPv6 profile treat RFC 3484 as SHOULD+ - which means in the future it will be essential (MUST) for Mac OS X to be certified:
http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/45731-1.html


2. It is very annoying, that some applications are not handling IPv6 properly (e.g. Firefox), since by default IPv6 disabled. You have to set if you want to access IPv6 websites:
network.dns.disableIPv6=false


With proper RFC 3484 implementation the preference could be set to IPv4:


root@csoki# telnet www.freebsd.org 80 Trying 2001:4f8:fff6::21... Connected to www.freebsd.org. Escape character is '^]'. ^] telnet> quit Connection closed. root@csoki# /etc/rc.d/ip6addrctl prefer_ipv4 root@csoki# telnet www.freebsd.org 80 Trying 69.147.83.33... Connected to www.freebsd.org. Escape character is '^]'. ^] telnet> quit Connection closed. root@csoki# /etc/rc.d/ip6addrctl prefer_ipv6 root@csoki# telnet www.freebsd.org 80 Trying 2001:4f8:fff6::21... Connected to www.freebsd.org. Escape character is '^]'. ^] telnet> quit Connection closed.

The implementation of ip6addrctl is not very difficult. The userland tool can be found:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/usr.sbin/ip6addrctl/

The necessary changes in libc:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-all/2004-May/066735.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-all/2004-May/066752.html

The necessary changes in the kernel to store and handle policy table:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-all/2003-October/032131.html


I would like to have some comment form Apple side when this might be implemented and allowed to change from System Preferences.


Yours sincerely,

Janos Mohacsi
Network Engineer, Research Associate, Head of Network Planning and Projects
NIIF/HUNGARNET, HUNGARY
Key 70EF9882: DEC2 C685 1ED4 C95A 145F  4300 6F64 7B00 70EF 9882
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Macnetworkprog mailing list      (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden


  • Follow-Ups:
    • Re: Supported IPv6 standards on MacOS X?
      • From: Quinn <email@hidden>
  • Prev by Date: Re: CFURL crash: multi-threading issue?
  • Next by Date: Re: Supported IPv6 standards on MacOS X?
  • Previous by thread: EAP-TLS in Leopard
  • Next by thread: Re: Supported IPv6 standards on MacOS X?
  • Index(es):
    • Date
    • Thread