Enabling IPv6 breaks Apple Music on HomePod mini

I have a problem that occurs when I want to play certain radio stations through Siri on my homepod mini. If I ask Siri to play e.g. "NPO Radio 2", Siri will respond with "There was a problem with Apple Music" after around 10 seconds and no music will be played. Other radio stations do play normally. I noticed that when I use the homepod mini on another network at another location, the issue would not happen.

I have a network with several VLANs. On the regular LAN, I have two homepod minis and an Apple TV 4k. I run pfSense on a Netgate 6100 with the latest (at the time of writing this post) firmware 23.09.1.

After trying to figure out what it is, I finally figured out it is linked to IPv6 being enabled on my LAN. When I turn off IPv6 functionality, everything works as expected. As soon as I enable IPv6 again, the same issue appears. Base IPv6 configuration is that I get a PD of /48 from my fiber provider KPN. I track the interface on my LAN. I have setup Router Advertisements in Assisted mode as per one of the many tutorials for my provider on the internet.

I read somewhere that there could be a priority clash between Router Advertisement messages coming from the Apple Matter/Thread networking functionality and that from pfSense. I tried heightening the priority for RA messages in pfSense from normal to high. That does not resolve the error.

I am looking for suggestions on what could be the root cause for this issue. I want to figure out a way of having both IPv6 working on my pfSense and have the Apple devices behave as they should. I know I do not need IPv6, but hey, I'm a hobbyist in search of trouble ;-)

Posted on Feb 23, 2024 3:54 AM

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Feb 25, 2024 9:19 AM in response to Haraldinho

After digging deeper and lots of analysis, I came to the embarrassing conclusion that my IPv6 setup was incorrect. It only appeared working because I had "Limit IP address tracking" enabled on my Mac. This makes the Mac route traffic through Apple's obfuscation service through Cloudflare

In reality IPv6 internet connectivity did not work at all on the LAN. Problem solved anyway :-)

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Enabling IPv6 breaks Apple Music on HomePod mini

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