Setting Mac OSX IPv4/IPv6 precedence?

[adlewis]

Ok so we're running an IPv6 tunnel from HE.net on our office LAN. It works but some sites are dead-slow to load or don't load at all. So I've asked everyone to configure their workstations to prefer v4 over v6 when both are available. Unfortunately a few people are using Mac OSX and so far as we've been able to establish it doesn't look like OSX provides a way to set a preference (the way Windows/Linux/*BSD do). I was hopeful some-one might be able to tell us that there is a way. ;)

[kcochran]

Which revision OSX?  With Lion anything which uses the higher level Cocoa APIs (NSStreamSocket and friends) should effectively run with 'happy eyeballs', trying both v4/v6 and using whichever one has better connection metrics.

[adlewis]

Not sure what version of OSX they're using. Ideally I'd like to configure them to always favour IPv4 when available like possible on other OS.  ???

[k1mu]

Sorry, Apple doesn't think you need to be able to set a preference. At least under OSX Lion, the system tries to obtain both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and maintains a cache of what protocol works better and prefers that.

See, for example, http://lists.apple.com/archives/Ipv6-dev/2011/Jul/msg00009.html

(This thread starts here if you want to read the whole thing: http://lists.apple.com/archives/Ipv6-dev/2011/Jul/msg00007.html)