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Encountered this problem with upgrading from a 3rd gen iPad Pro to a 5th gen. I’d successfully made a backup of the device on a Mac. The iPad uses a separate Apple ID for iCloud and for Media and Purchases. The former is for the shared Apple apps like Contacts, Calendar, Mail etc. And the latter for App Store, Apple Music and subscription services.

However, the new iPad with the restored backup couldn’t sync the music library in Apple Music via the “Sync Library” feature. Here’s what was tried with Apple Support over chat and telephone support:

• Toggle “Sync Library” on and off
• Logged in and out of both iCloud and Media and Purchases
• Rebooted iPad repeatedly

For whatever reason, something in the restored backup was blocking Apple Music from downloading the library. What was interesting was that adding a playlist on the iPad would be reflected in the library on other devices synced to the library. So it was a one-way problem. After a few hours of testing different scenarios, here’s a workaround which has the downside that requires the apps to reinstalled one by one:

1. Reset the iPad as new device
2. Don’t restore a backup, login to iCloud and Media and Purchases separately
3. Open Apple Music and confirm the iCloud music library is syncing
4. Check iCloud apps are syncing
5. Reinstall apps

This approach restores everything that is backed up to iCloud, including Messages, but only if you have turned this on.

Bufferbloat is a known problem and can be exacerbated on fast Internet connections like a Gigabit fibre service. One way to reduce bufferbloat and throttling by ISPs is to use a router that has smart queue management algorithms.

On a Unifi Dream Machine, this is a setting called Smart Queues and it apparently uses an algorithm called FQ-CoDel. You specify a download and upload speed. This is particularly needed to avoid access being affected by the NBN policer.

With a setting of 1000 mbps down and 50 mbps up on an AussieBroadband FTTP 1000/50 service, this is what the Bufferbloat test on Waveform delivers:

And on the DSL Reports Bufferbloat speedtest, a similar result:

One of the features of Pihole is its ability to show a query log of which device made a query to a particular domain. This works fine on an IPv4 network. But when IPv6 is enabled, and the Pihole is used for DNS resolution the query logs have entries with unhelpful hostnames. This arises because Pihole doesn’t issue the IPv6 address for the device and the name it shows is the reverse DNS entry for the address. There are ugly workarounds. This article proposes a few, and there’s a script here, but none are really turnkey solutions. The problem is shown in the screenshot below.

My solution is to block all DNS requests on the IPv6 network from my clients to the Pihole. This forces the clients to use IPv4 which is logged by the Pihole and the request is shown against the IPv4 hostname. This requires the Pihole to be the DHCP server for the IPv4 addresses.

This is what the Pihole’s DHCP screen looks like.

One anomaly I encountered in my setup is I could not block DNS requests if the Pihole was on the same VLAN as my client devices. As you can see from the screenshot, the clients are on the 10.0.0.0 network The firewall on the Unifi Dream Machine does seem to be able to do this. So my workaround is to move the Pihole on to another VLAN, eg 192.168.11.0, which the firewall is able to block. So the Ethernet port of the Pi is set on the 192 VLAN and the Wireless LAN is on the same 10.0.0.0 VLAN as my clients, handing out DHCP addresses. Voila. Hostnames are back on a fully functioning IPv6 network.

My network uses a Unifi Dream Machine and implements VLANs. I needed a managed switch for some Ethernet devices and I had a Mikrotik Cloud Router Switch CRS125-24G from a few years ago. Previously I never used it for VLANs, and there’s no guide on how to do this except for a video on YouTube: “How To Configure Mikrotik Cloud Router Switch VLAN’s CRS1xx…” – the good news is that it the UDM and Mikrotik seems to work together.

Hope it helps if you’ve got one of these switches.