[PLUG] Browser Blues - ALMOST Resolved

[Bruce Kilpatrick]

Does Verizon use IPv6?


Michael M wrote:

>On Fri, 2006-03-17 at 20:13 -0800, William A Morita wrote:
>  
>
>>I was too hasty with my prior posting.
>>I would appear that Konquorer is operational.
>>Firefox is only able retrieve pages that Konquorer had fetched.
>>This is getting stranger and stranger.
>>
>>Anyone, any guesses as to the root cause here?
>>    
>>
>
>Sounds like exactly the problem I had.  Basically, as was explained in a
>previous thread a few weeks ago (when I had mentioned my problem),
>there's a bug in the kernel that doesn't handle the absence of IPv6
>properly.  Presumably, your ISP is not providing IPv6 yet (mine -- Qwest
>-- is not).  What should happen is that when IPv6 requests go out and
>don't receive a reply, the network should default to IPv4.  Or something
>like that.  Instead, it just waits for a reply over IPv6.  Konqueror
>works because it isn't IPv6-enabled yet, so it's only using IPv4 from
>the get-go (doesn't send anything out over IPv6).  The same with w3m if
>you invoke it with "-4".  Gecko-based browsers (Mozilla, Firefox,
>Epiphany), however, are IPv6 enabled, so they just hang, because the
>network is waiting for a reply over IPv6 that will never arrive.
>
>I had the same thing happen with Gecko browsers you describe -- if I
>browsed to any website with Konqueror or w3m -4 first, then Firefox etc.
>would load the page.  Otherwise, they wouldn't load anything.  I don't
>completely understand why this is the case, but my grasp of all of this
>is pretty tenuous.
>
>I don't know how you address the problem in Fedora.  In Debian, I
>commented out "alias net-pf-10 ipv6" and added "alias net-pf-10 off"
>in /etc/modprobe.d/aliases.  That shuts down network support of IPv6
>altogether, and the problem goes away.  It's not exactly a fix, but it's
>a workaround.  Fedora might be different, though.
>
>Oh, I read that a reboot was required after
>editing /etc/modprobe.d/aliases.  Apparently, just stopping and
>restarting the network won't do the trick.
>
>  
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