[PLUG] Browser Blues and IPV6

[Keith Lofstrom]

I just got caught by the IPV6 / Mozilla problem.  My wife's office
computer runs SUSE 10, and has automated updates configured.  
Sometime in the past week, it updated something(?).  Mozilla
would no longer do DNS, though it would still fetch webpages
given an IP address, much like the problems others have commented
on here.  Fortunately, the discussion on this list pointed me at
a solution.

The solution was to go into the file /etc/modprobe.conf, and
find the line reading:

  alias net-pf-10     ipv6

and add another line after it:

  alias net-pf-10     ipv6
  install ipv6        /bin/true

I rebooted the machine (remotely) and tried Mozilla (remotely,
using ssh+X through two VPN tunnels) and it worked.

--------

Note, what DIDN'T work was attempting to use SUSE's yast command
to fiddle with the network.  Not only did it not offer a way to
edit the information in /etc/modprobe.conf, or in any other way
turn off ipv6, it also hung the network on exit.  So my wife had
to make a special trip back to her office to reboot the machine.  

Yes, changing the network configuration from remote is like 
do-it-yourself brain surgery.  However, if one exits without making
changes, one would think yast would recognize that no changes were
made, and leave the cottin-pickin running processes alone.  Oh well...

---------

Another annoyance was that my virtual colo provider, which I VPN
tunnel through to connect to her office, was going through upheaval
last night while I was trying to do all this - the uptime to that
point was months, and most reboots before that took minutes.  The
bad news was that they were debugging for almost 8 hours, the good
news was that this was day shift in New Zealand so it did not affect
my US customers.   The bad news was that it did affect my customer
in Shanghai, the great news is that they used the fixup opportunity
to repair some of the other virtual machines I share a host with.
This resulted in an open proxy closed, some repaired postfixes,
and a much lower load average.  They proved the power of Xen, by 
moving running the virtual machines around between hosts.   They
proved a pitfall, when they moved my virtual machine back to an
incorrectly repaired host and it died.  Hopefully, next time the
mistakes will be new and different.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs