Orbi and IPv6 Feedback and Experiences

This is additional information for the Engineers, as I had another IPv6-related failure. I also have links to 2 dropbox files which are LAN/WAN debug captures, which I sent to Netgear but are not linked here.

I added this info to my support ticket #48125362.

This morning I woke to find that my iPhone 15 (purchased fall 2023) and my new iPad Pro (new last week) both had lost WiFi. In both cases, the WiFi Settings showed a connection to my network, yet the top right corner said "5G". I verified in Speediest that the network being used was my cellular carrier not my WiFi network. Also, I checked the RBR960 and both RBS960s, and none had any colored lights for the LED. I checked their debug pages, all was fine - memory and CPU was stable and where it should be, both RBSs showed a hop count of 1.

I also plugged my phone into an ethernet cable, and that worked fine. So the Internet/from Comcast, my modem, the router were all fine supplying network access. Only WiFi was failing.

Other Apple devices in the house were fine. I checked a MacBook Pro 2023, MacBook Pro 2022, iPhone SE (4-5 years old), and an iPad (around 5 years old). Things I tried, to restore WiFi on these 2 devices, without success:

- I turned WiFi off and on, on the device.
- I moved around the house and tested next to both RBSs and the RBR.
- Since both devices support the WiFi 6E standard, I turned that off, to see if WiFi 5 was available. It was not.
- Private WiFi address is turned off on my home network. I tried with it turned on.
- Limit IP address tracking is normally turned on - I tried with it turned off.
- I restarted the device

So I finally found something that worked. I did a Reset Network Settings on both devices. Then, I re-added them to the WiFi network. All worked fine! So at this point, I thought maybe just something got messed up on the new devices, or it could be an issue with the Orbi and newer devices working. But then...

I went to put both devices on their manual IP addresses. I have about 6 devices in the house on manual addresses, starting at 192.168.1.152 (my DHCP pool is 192.168.1.1- .150). Note, DHCP is provided by the Orbi RBR960. As soon as I added the manual IP address, WiFi was lost! I went back to automatic DHCP, and it worked. I readied the manual entry, and 5G came back! So it seemed at this point, the RBR960 was not able to handle a manual IP address. I made sure there was no conflict on the ip address being used.

At this point, I left the devices on automatic so they would have WiFi. I did some more testing and checking things out, and I discovered NO DEVICE on the network had IPv6 - it said when I tested, that there was no public IPv6 address that the test server could see. IPv6 had been fine for at least a month, since I turned off the default IPv6 DNS servers (Comcast), and manually entered two IPv6 Google DNS servers. So then, I did what I have done in the past to restore IPv6 - I re-selected DHCP on the Advanced/IPv6 page on the router admin page, and IPv6 came back for everybody.

One last piece though - I went back, and found I had no issues entering a manual IP address for the two devices! So the IPv6 failure seemed to kill the manual IP address use of two late-model devices.

There are 2 debug capture files. One is called "Debug Log no WiFi.zip". While this was running, I made a point to turn off/on WiFi on the devices, thinking maybe a failure would be seen in the log file. 

The second log file is "Debug Log ipv6 fail and redetect.zip" - this was running after I discovered IPv6 had failed, and I continued to have it run through the re-detect of DHCP on the Advanced /IPv6 page of the router.

I can provide these if anyone else needs them - they are linked on support ticket #48125362.