AT&T Uverse IPv6 vs. Mac OS X 10.(old)

[Tapley, Mark]

(Apologies in advance to non-Apple users)

Mac folks,
	Last week AT&T “upgraded” our Uverse service. All of our Macs running anything 10.6.8 or older quit working. 
	Cure was to turn off IPv6: System Preferences -> Network -> Advanced -> TCP/IP -> iPv6 to “Off” instead of “Automatic”.

	Symptoms were *very* widespread, and matched reasonably well to failing hard drive or failing memory - system freeze, spinning beach-ball forever, can’t read directory, etc. etc. etc.  On the G3, I rebooted in single-user mode and actually got part way through the output of “ps -aux” in one case before freezing. However it did respond to Ctl-C and would then do a “ps -a” no problem, just no “ps -aux”.  We were a bit silly, didn’t read our Uverse email, and didn’t test other systems before hooking more old systems into the network - which then didn’t work. We were panicing about viruses, pulling hair out, sacrificing goats ...

	Systems affected were :

iMac G3 Mac OS X 10.4.11  - ethernet
PowerBook G4 Mac OS X 10.4.11 - wi-fi
iMac 2011 intel Mac OS X 10.6.8 - wi-fi

	Apologies if this is a known bug, but it really puzzled us for a while because the effects were so systemic; I hope I can prevent anybody else from getting a nice new (needless) hard drive like the 2011 iMac did…

					- Mark
					210-522-6025 office         210-379-4635    cell