This is a heads up for any Mac users who have experienced degraded internet performance after upgrading to OS X Tiger…
Tiger has been a great upgrade for my Powerbook, but one thing has constantly frustrated me… My internet connection just hasn’t seemed to be the same. Whenever I’d open the lid (waking it from sleep) it would take several seconds to establish a connection. It showed me as connected to my wireless network instantly, but I couldn’t get any data to transfer. Safari would always give me a “No Network Connection” page, when I knew it was wrong. Loading web content in general was also very slow. I thought it was my internet connection because Alisa would complain about the speed issues when she came over with her iBook (also upgraded to Tiger).
My buddy Darin pointed me to the answer at maniacalrage.net. Apparently Tiger sets an option for “IPv6″ to “Automatic” in the Network preferences pane. Switching this option to “Off” has hopefully restored my network connection back to how it should be. It seems a bit faster, but I still get some lag establishing a connection. I’m hoping a restart might solve the problem completely now that the setting is changed. Honestly, I’m not sure what IPv6 is (beyond the obvious fact that it has to do with IP settings) and I’m not sure why Tiger would enable it, but disabling it seems to fix a lot of problems for a lot of people.
Link: Maniacal Rage. Tiger Internet Tip.
IPv6 is supposedly the solution to our problems that the world will eventually run out of IP addresses to assign to devices. It adds many many new possible IP addresses instead of just the normal 192.168.1.1 type addresses. An IPv6 address might look like 2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334 (taken from Wikipedia).
I am not sure about the specifics of it really other than that. For more fun, there is always Wikipedia.
Ah! Thanks for the heads up Jon. I always forget to utilize the great wealth of information at Wikipedia when I need to know something.