We sent our Google TV to a VLAN of shame - and it wasn’t even the problem.

A few weeks ago I finally got around to adding IPv6 to our home network. The transition was surprisingly smooth, aside from a BSD jail on our NAS that was absolutely determined to communicate via IPv6 without actually having it configured, which silently broke our backups for a couple of days.

The bigger mystery came afterward: our Android devices briefly picked up IPv6 addresses, then stopped - only fe80:: link-locals remaining, which left them without connectivity beyond the local segment.

A Wireshark trace showed our Google TV sending out router advertisements three times as often as our actual firewall, so it seemed like an obvious suspect - we exiled it to a dedicated VLAN and waited for things to sort themselves out.

They didn’t.

Digging a bit further, I realized we had moved from SLAAC to DHCPv6 somewhere along the way, to get dynamic DNS registration working with our local resolver. On OPNSense, that means radvd running in “managed” mode, which tells clients to use DHCPv6 for address assignment - and as it turns out, Android’s support for DHCPv6 is still rather lacking, even in 2026.

The fix was switching radvd from “managed” to “assisted,” a mode that tells clients to use SLAAC for their addresses while still pointing them at the DHCPv6 server for additional configuration like DNS. Within 30 seconds, our Androids had proper IPv6 addresses and have been working fine ever since.

The Google TV remains in its VLAN of shame, though. On principle.

Are there any tricks like this you could share — things that should be simple but somehow never quite are?