Why does enabling IPv6 increase upload traffic volume?

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curlysir

Limp Gawd
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Mar 20, 2007
Messages
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Operating system is Windows 7 Pro 64 bit, MB is Asus M4A79T-Deluxe, CPU is AMD 965, router is Netgear WNDR3700. I live in a rural area and do not have close neighbors and I have the wireless encrypted.

I have Wildblue (No other real options) as an internet provider and they have a "Fair Access Policy" which limits download and upload traffic on a 30 day rolling total. About 3 weeks ago I noticed my upload volume start making a very sharp increase. Download was not impacted. So I start looking for the cause and run virus checkers, check all running programs and can't find the cause. During this period the upload for 30 days keeps increasing. Where it had been ranging from 300 to 500 MB since 2006 it had jumped to 1700 MB and was increasing daily. I don't know where it would have leveled off. The traffic meter on my router also showed the increase. As far as I could tell the increase in upload traffic was the only thing impacted.

Anyway, I found the source of the increase, it was IPv6 and the Terdeo Tunneling Pseudo-Interface device that goes with it being enabled. I had enabled it for Homegroup. As soon as I disable IPv6 the Terdeo Tunneling Pseudo-Interface device also is disabled and the upload volume returns to the previous levels . And if I enable it the upload volume starts increasing immediately. This is repeatable and the results are evident by the activity on the lights on the Modem and router, and the traffic monitor on the router.

I have disabled IPv6 as I really don't use Homegroup and see no other problems at the present time to running with IPv6 disabled.

I have spent considerable amount of time the last few days researching this and can't find any information on this.

Questions:

1. Is this normal for IPv6?
2. If not what would be causing this increase.

Comments Please!
 
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Your router shouldn't be passing the link-local IPv6 traffic upstream (the intra-homegroup traffic - if your ipv6 address starts with fe80 and it's the only one, then all traffic is link local). Hell, as far as I can tell your router doesn't even support IPv6. If you're not getting a public IPv6 address, then your router wouldn't get IPv6 DNS and it wouldn't resolve anything to a v6 address, hence no outbound traffic on v6. Try disabling the tunneling adapters (isatap & teredo). That's the only way I can think of that IPv6 could leave your network.
 
da sponge said:
Your router shouldn't be passing the link-local IPv6 traffic upstream (the intra-homegroup traffic - if your ipv6 address starts with fe80 and it's the only one, then all traffic is link local). Hell, as far as I can tell your router doesn't even support IPv6. Try disabling the tunneling adapters (isatap & teredo). That's the only way I can think of that IPv6 could leave your network.
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Yes, I agree the router does not support IPv6 and my ip adress in an IPv4. When I say enable I mean on my local computer and the Terdeo Tunneling Pseudo-Interface device that goes with it that is required for Homegroup. The Terdeo device will not enable when IPv6 is disabled.
 
sooo enable ipv6 and disable teredo. i think that requires a netsh command - its googleable.
 
da sponge said:
sooo enable ipv6 and disable teredo. i think that requires a netsh command - its googleable.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the comments.

I did run across the netsh command to enable and disable teredo in my research when I was trying to get Homegroup to work. It did not seem to have any impact at the time. I later found out that the real problem was that ZoneAlarm was keeping IPv6 from enabling. After I changed ZoneAlarm to enable IPv6 Teredo started working alone with Homegroup. Homegroup is something that I would like to have working but it also something that I can live without. For me right now the extra overhead of the increased upload is not worth it.

I have found that IPv6 and Teredo are enabled by default in Win7 but ZoneAlarm by default turns it off. I may have screwed up something when I was trying to get Teredo to work previously but when I enable IPv6 in ZA and run ipconfig /all everything looks ok and the device for Teredo is enabled in Device Manager.
 
Update: In 5 days the 30 day upload total has dropped from 1707 MB to 1547 MB. For those of you on an unlimited plan this may not seem like a big deal, But for those of us that are unfortunate enough to not have anything available but satellite the increased usage was a big concern. My upload allowable is 5000 MB and if I exceed that I get kicked back to dial up speeds until the usage drops to 80% of the allowable. I was only at 34% but the trend was not good.

At least I know what was causing the increase, I just don't know why. Have been searching on the net but still have not found any real answer. For now IPv6 is disabled and the Teredo Tunneling device is disabled.

I plan on doing some more testing when I get my usage back down to "normal" levels.
 
teredo is an ipv6 over ipv4 compatibility hack. Every connection sent from teredo'd host to an IPv6 host is first sent to one of microsofts servers to help establish the connection. It is then routed through a Teredo tunnel server. Teredo is encapsulated in udp, so it does not matter if your router is compatible or not, it will still work, hence why it was designed how it was. If for some reason your homegroup computers were sending all the traffic between them over teredo, that would cause your issue. However, I don't see why they'd use teredo addresses over their link local addresses. Who knows how its actually setup.

Also, many torrent programs are supporting ipv6/teredo now so that people stuck behind nats can upload easier.
 
Where are you located that you are on wild blue? A local co-op offers that service...
 
notnyt said:
teredo is an ipv6 over ipv4 compatibility hack. Every connection sent from teredo'd host to an IPv6 host is first sent to one of microsofts servers to help establish the connection. It is then routed through a Teredo tunnel server. Teredo is encapsulated in udp, so it does not matter if your router is compatible or not, it will still work, hence why it was designed how it was. If for some reason your homegroup computers were sending all the traffic between them over teredo, that would cause your issue. However, I don't see why they'd use teredo addresses over their link local addresses. Who knows how its actually setup.

Also, many torrent programs are supporting ipv6/teredo now so that people stuck behind nats can upload easier.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info, this is the kind of info I am looking for. I will play with the homegroup and see if the problem is there. I don't use torrent as far as I know and I can't find a virus, spyware, or malware. This really has me bugged as I appear to be the only one with this problem. I have done a lot of looking since I started chasing this problem and can't really find anything about it.

The 30 day upload volume has gone down daily since I turned off IPv6 and will be down to a level in a few days where I can establish a good baseline to start experimenting. I have another computer that I may switch to temporarily to see if is an isolated problem on my main computer or something common. I did switch routers about 6 weeks ago, but It was in use for about 3 weeks before the problem started. If I can't find anything else I may put the other router back in service temporarily.
 
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