On 9/11/2010 11:19 AM, Lew Wolfgang wrote:
On 09/11/2010 04:50 AM, James Knott wrote:
Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 2010-09-09 18:06, James Knott wrote:
One thing I see in this thread, is people saying that since IPv6 isn't yet supported by everything, we shouldn't use it at all. If everyone did that, then we'll never be able to use it. IPv6 is available and usable now. The more it gets used, the more the laggards will have to provide support or be left behind. I have seen, with oS 11.3, many people complaining of "slow internet", and the reply is always "disable ipv6".
Thus, it is "obvious" that support for ipv6 is broken and/or incomplete in current openSUSE>:-)
I have seen those messages too and I wonder why. I have never had the need to disable IPv6 because of that. Perhaps it's an issue with the DNS server they're using.
I think the slowness is due to DNS timeouts where support for IPv6 is incomplete. You can also disable IPv6 in Firefox to speed up lookups:
<http://soniahamilton.wordpress.com/2009/01/09/speed-up-firefox-on-linux-disable-ipv6-lookups/>
There can be other problems when doing large-scale IPv6 deployments. I helped with the deployment of IPv6 on a network of approximately 18,000 hosts. The customer has been working on this, literally, for years and has only recently achieved enablement rates above 95%. NAT is forbidden on this network by policy, so that wasn't an issue.
Linux/UNIX hosts weren't a problem, except for very old distributions. The lion's share of hosts were Windows XP boxes, older Windows systems were disallowed by policy and active registration filtering. Enabling XP required a number of command-line config changes that didn't always work reliably. For example, if a user had Symantec Endpoint Protection installed, IPv6 packets would be dropped on the floor.
Another more insidious problem was the case where Win-XP was running on a dual-homed box (two or more Ethernet interfaces). Windows, always wanting to be helpful, assumed that if it is running on a dual-homed box that it should be a router. It would then advertise itself as a 6-to-4 router under IPv6 and would siphon away IPv6 packets on it's subnet and dump them on its inside interface. This was BAD and caused no end of heartbreak until we figured out what was going on. The IDS guy figured out how to remotely sense when this condition happened and have automated email sent to the right people to fix the problem.
Bottom line: There WILL be issues when converting even a small mixed home NAT network to IPv6. These issues can be subtle indeed, way above what an average home user can handle.
Regards, Lew
This is the reason I read threads like this. Thanks. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org