For the last few days it has been hard to remain true to my free and open source roots. I guess I’ve been spoiled lately with almost everything I try out “just working”, but it wasn’t so with my upgrade to OmniROM 6.0 on my Nexus 6 (shamu).

I’ve been a big fan of OmniROM since it came out, and I base my phone purchases on what handsets are officially supported. While I tend not to rush to upgrade to the latest and greatest, once the official nightlies switched to Android “Marshmallow” I decided to make the jump.

Now there are a couple of tools that I can’t live without when playing with my phone. They are the Team Win Recovery Project (TWRP) and Titanium Backup. The first lets you create easy to restore complete backups and the latter allows you to restore application status even if you factory reset your device, which I had to do.

[NOTE: I should also mention that I rely on Chainfire’s SuperSU for root. It took me awhile to find a link for it I trust.]

When I tried the first 6.0 nightlies, all I did was sideload the ROM, wipe the caches, and reboot. I liked the new “OMNI” splash screen but once the phone booted, the error “Unfortunately process com.android.phone has stopped” popped up and couldn’t be cleared. Some investigation suggested a factory reset would fix the issue, but since I didn’t want to go through the hassle of restoring all of my applications I decided to just restore OmniROM 5.1 and wait to see if a later build would fix it.

Well, this weekend we got a dose of winter weather and I ended up home bound for several days, so I decided to give it another shot. I sideloaded the latest 6.0 nightly and sure enough, the same error occurred. So I did a factory reset and, voilà, the problem went away.

Now all I had to do was reload all 100+ apps. (sigh)

I started by installing the “pico” GApps package from Open GApps and in case you were wondering, the Nexus 6 uses a 32-bit ARM processor.

I guess I really shouldn’t complain, as doing a fresh install once in awhile can clean out a bunch of kruft that I’ve installed over the past year or so, but I’ve come expect OmniROM upgrades to be pretty easy.

One of the first things I installed from the Play store was the “K-9 Mail” application. Unfortunately, it kept having problems connecting to my personal mail server (the work one was fine). The sync would error with “SocketTimeoutException: fai”. So I rebooted back to Omni 5.1 and things seemed to work okay (although I did see that error when trying to sync some of the folders). Back I went to 6.0 (see where TWRP would come in handy here?) and I noticed that when I disabled Wi-Fi, it worked fine.

As I was trying to sleep last night it hit me – I bet it has something to do with IPv6. We use true IPv6 at the office, but not to our external corporate mail server, which would explain why a server in the office would fail but the other one work. At home I’m on Centurylink DSL and they don’t offer it (well, they offer 6rd which is IPv6 encapsulated over IPv4 but not only is it not “true” IPv6 you have to pay extra for a static IP to get it to work). I use a Hurricane Electric tunnel and apparently Marshmallow utilizes a different IPv6 stack and thus has issues trying to retrieve data from my mail server when using that protocol.

(sigh)

I tried turning off IPv6 on Android. It’s not easy and I couldn’t get any of the suggestions to work. Then I found a post that suggested it was the MTU, so I reduced the MTU to 1280 and still no love.

So I turned off the HE tunnel. Bam! K-9 started working fine.

For now I’ve just decided to leave IPv6 off. While I think we need to migrate there sooner rather than later, there is nothing I absolutely have to have IPv6 for at the moment and I think as bandwidth increases, having to tunnel will start to cause performance issues. Normal traffic, such as using rsync, seems to be faster without IPv6.

That experience cost me about two days, but at the moment I’m running the latest OmniROM and I’m pretty happy with it. The one open issue I have is that the AOSP keyboard crashes if you try to swipe (gesture type) but I just installed the Google Keyboard and now it works without issue.

I have to say that there were some moments when I was very close to installing the Google factory image back on my Nexus 6. It’s funny, but the ability to shake the phone to dismiss an alarm is kind of a critical app with me. Since the last time I checked it wasn’t an available option on the Google ROM, I was willing to stick it out a little longer and figure out my issues with OmniROM.

Heh, freedom.