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IPv6 problem of an IPv4 user



I apologize for posting this on a developer list, but so far I did not get any useful clues from the user list or from Usenet.

I have a home network which contains 2 linux boxes. One is the gateway/firewall (2 NIC's, one for the LAN, one for the ADSL modem). The ADSL line is of the pptp type.

The gateway has no keyboard or monitor; so I telnet into it from the other machine if I want to change anything. The telnet daemon on the gateway only listens to the home network, not to the outside world (I use xinetd).

The system has no name server. I rely on /etc/hosts files and (for outside addresses) the ISP's name servers in /etc/resolv.conf.

However, something is seriously wrong with name resolution on my system, as I recently discovered when I started to play with tcpdump.

(Note -- on the gateway machine, I can see what happens on the
         outside line by means of (telnet to gateway, then)
         tcpdump -i ppp0.
      -- on the other machine, I can see what happens on the LAN
         by just tcpdump.)

So when I recently looked at the traffic on the LAN, I saw that
when I did a telnet to the gateway, a DNS request was sent to the ISP's nameservers. I other words, the outside world got involved with something strictly local. I hardly know anything about DNS, but I noticed that the tcpdump output had "AAAA" in it, meaning (as far as I know) a request for an IPv6 address.

The local (IPv4 of course) address of the gateway is 192.168.1.2. When I did a telnet to its numerical address (instead of its name) no DNS traffic appeared on the LAN.

I also found that when instead of

   telnet <gatewaymachinename>

I called

   telnet -4 <gatewaymachinename>

no DNS traffic appeared *on the LAN*. The -4 option on telnet means "force IPv4 address resolution". So I thought I had solved it. In fact I announced this proudly on the user list...

But I haven't solved it. Telnetting to the gateway still generates
"AAAA" type DNS requests to the outside world -- on the ADSL line.
And what's more, these requests are generated even if I specify the gateway's numerical address instead of its name.

The only thing I can think of is that in.telnetd on the gateway does this. But how do I stop it?

System information: both systems Debian Woody. Both systems have *no* support for IPv6 compiled in the kernel (at the moment I have no use whatever for IPv6).

Enlightenment would be much appreciated. Solutions should preferably not involve installing a nameserver...

Regards, Jan



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