In some sense it is nice to see a push for progress on IPv6. And yet, it is also painfully clear that these networks are not ready, even for the big sites like

In some sense it is nice to see a push for progress on IPv6. And yet, it is also painfully clear that these networks are not ready, even for the big sites like Google. For instance, there are Google machines that are apparently IPv6 only. Over the last several months I have had major issues reaching Google domains like Google.com, YouTube, etc. from my home Internet. It will either work seamlessly, or hang seemingly forever when trying to look up one of the URLs (which is oh so fun when I am trying to search Google frequently). It only hangs for Google domains. I dug up a forum post that was over a YEAR old where people finally figured out that all of this crap was due to IPv6! They were literally turning off IPv6 entirely on their Macs in order to make Google searches work again. The symptom is a trace-route stumbling on the way to 1e100.net (one of Google’s backbone domains). Sadly, I can imagine people screaming at their ISPs over stuff like this. I haven’t gone as far as to kill all of my IPv6 connections but I do have to turn off WiFi and turn it back on to force some kind of a network reset whenever this shit starts happening on my MacBook. Even then, the problem will eventually return, and is pretty much guaranteed to return by closing the lid and coming back later (how foolish of me to expect the Internet to be useful when I open the lid?). Networking on the Mac is a mess, to say the least. Even if this isn’t entirely Apple’s fault, it is entirely their problem for having poor fault-tolerance. For instance, if I were them the first thing I’d do is write a script to turn off the WiFi and turn it back on in case of a problem, since that seems to solve 90% of issues all by itself.