As you know, #Tableau Server 8.1 supports IPv6. Recently I stood up a new 8.1 machine and noticed a strange (and new to me) behavior when trying to request a trusted ticket locally on the machine. 

I’d already added 127.0.0.1 to the trusted_hosts list for Tableau Server, but attempts to get a ticket kept on failing with -1. 

Looking in in Apache’s access log, I saw this entry:

::1 – – [06/Nov/2013:06:59:34 -0500] 80 “POST /trusted HTTP/1.1” “::1” 200 2 “15” 15625 UnovJsCoyx0AABpMnyAAAAC0

My request was coming in via IPv6 instead of IPv4 – the ::1 address vs. the “expected by Russell” 127.0.0.1 address. I thought this was weird since I had de-selected IPv6 in the networking properties of my network card. 

Turns out simply turning off IPv6 isn’t as simple as deselecting a checkbox. You have to (literally) add a registry entry to disable it and then bounce your machine. Here’s a walk through written for Windows 8 that worked nicely on my Windows 2012 server:

http://www.techunboxed.com/2012/08/how-to-disable-ipv6-in-windows-8.html

After I followed these steps, all was well. 

However, I then remembered that in Tableau 8.1 we allow you to use a hostname in trusted_hosts, not just ip addresses:

http://onlinehelp.tableausoftware.com/v8.1/server/en-us/help.htm#trusted_auth_trustIP.htm

So, I: 

• Turned IPv6 back on by removing the registry entry in the Tech Unboxed article
• Replaced all my ip addresses in trusted_hosts with hostnames
• Bounced Tableau Server

…and found that approach worked, too. So, if you ever run into the same issue, there are two ways to deal with it.

Keep in mind, this isn’t a Tableau problem per se, we just become the victim of Windows networking stack idiosyncrasies.