[PLUG] Browser Blues - Continued

Elliott Mitchell ehem at m5p.com
Sat Mar 25 01:07:37 UTC 2006


>From: "Michael M." <nixlists at writemoore.net>
> On Thu, 2006-03-23 at 20:28 -0800, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
> > >From: "Michael M." <nixlists at writemoore.net>
> > > 
> > > Well, yes ... presumably, those people for whom it's working don't need
> > > to do anything. :-)
> > 
> > Untrue. Lots of programs need additional patches to support IPv6, anyone
> > wanting operational IPv6 tends to have a number of things to fix.
> 
> All I meant was that if you aren't having any IPv6 issues, then it's
> nothing to worry about.  Honestly, stand in Pioneer Courthouse Sq. for
> awhile and ask passersby whether they are excited, concerned, relieved,
> or upset about the IPv6 transition.  I suspect most of them will give
> you a blank stare or worse, and before long the police would stop by to
> ask what you were doing.  Most people are blissfully unaware of IPv6.
> *I* would be blissfully unaware of it, had it not caused me so much
> trouble.  It's one of those things that a handful (relative to the
> general population) of folk have to concern themselves with; for
> everyone else, it's supposed to be seamless.

They're big on it in Asia, they've got a much smaller slice of the IPv4
space. I believe Europe also likes it, but they aren't quite as starved
for address spaces as Asia is.

> > > AFAICT, the modules are loaded at boot on Debian and Ubuntu.  IPv6 comes
> > > up in dmesg, or did until I disabled it.  This is the case with kernel
> > > versions 2.6.8 and 2.6.12.  What distros do not provide IPv6 support by
> > > default?
> > 
> > That would make sense as Debian and Ubuntu are closely related. Most
> > distributions though, you have to explicitly enable IPv6. I don't run
> > prebuilt kernels, but in Debian's installer I've noted that the IPv6
> > module was never loaded unless I told it to load it.
> 
> I don't know what you mean here.  At no time does either the Debian or
> the Ubuntu installer ask me anything about IPv6.  If I knew how to
> disable it at installation, I would.  The only way I know to address it
> is to edit the appropriate lines in /etc/modules.d/aliases.  But that
> happens after the installation, obviously.  Where do you tell Debian's
> installer to load the IPv6 module?  How do you tell it not to?

There is a dialog for optional modules, you can select the IPv6 kernel
module there. If you do a blanket selection of the extra kernel modules
you might get the IPv6 one as well, and you know the results.

> > Mentioned in the refered bug reports. Apparently in vanilla 2.6.8 if the
> > kernel is unable to route an IPv6 packet (or perhaps when it has no IPv6
> > default route), it simply drops it, while everyone else will reject
> > (produce a no route to host ICMP response). The result is when it
> > attempts to connect via IPv6, you wait until the connection times out,
> > then retry over IPv4 (which works). With the correct behavior, it would
> > then immediately try IPv4 and you'd be fine.
> 
> By "everyone else," you mean the *BSDs, OS X, and Windows?

Yes.


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