Resolved MacOS Sequoia 15.2 "limit IP address tracking" messing with DNS

[dmentre]

Hello,

On my MacBook Air M2 with MacOS Sequoia 15.2, I had issues with some non-Apple applications like Homebrew, Firefox or Thunderbird: suddenly and erratically I could no longer access the Internet with them! But strangely enough, Safari was working as expected.

Typical example, ping google.com no longer works:

% ping google.com
ping: cannot resolve google.com: Unknown host

However DNS is working:

% nslookup google.com
Server: 192.168.0.254
Address: 192.168.0.254#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: google.com
Address: 142.250.75.238

And network without DNS is also working:

% ping 142.250.75.238
PING 142.250.75.238 (142.250.75.238): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 142.250.75.238: icmp_seq=0 ttl=107 time=20.460 ms
64 bytes from 142.250.75.238: icmp_seq=1 ttl=107 time=12.322 ms
64 bytes from 142.250.75.238: icmp_seq=2 ttl=107 time=20.695 ms

To solve the issue, I had to disable "> Settings > Wifi> Details> limit IP address tracking".

After that, it works!

% ping google.com
PING google.com (142.250.75.238): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 142.250.75.238: icmp_seq=0 ttl=107 time=9.055 ms
64 bytes from 142.250.75.238: icmp_seq=1 ttl=107 time=12.510 ms

For the record, Firewall is enabled and has no role in this issue (enabling or disabling it does not change anything):

% /usr/libexec/ApplicationFirewall/socketfilterfw --getglobalstate
Firewall is enabled. (State = 1)

On all the previous releases of MacOS I used on this machine, I had always "limit IP address tracking" enabled without any issue.

I hope it can help others facing similar issues! It took me a while to figure it out!

Best regards,
david