Re: IPv6 in Debian
Hallo Release Team,
I've read in the release goals:
RELEASE GOALS
=============
* full IPv6 support
Advocate: Martin Zobel-Helas
and wrote to Martin Zobel-Helas who redirected me here.
My experience with IPv6 in Debian is foremost that it's a pita.
Debian enables IPv6 by default.
* AAAA before A DNS lookup
Long time ago I was seeing the behaveour described in [0][1] with
Debian. Since then I tweaked my own box a lot to get IPv6 out of my
way and can not reproduce it any more. Is AAAA before A DNS lookup still
a problem on Debian or has it been fixed? It causes a plethora of
problems among which are long delays on connections, failing DNS lookups
or plain "no internet" etc. In case Debian still does AAAA before A
lookups then that's a very high barrier to entry for Debian newbie
users, which will probably and rightly plain drop Debian when
encountering the problem.
(it might be that the implementation of RFC3484 as described
in the libc6 change "2006-05-18 David Woodhouse" as found in
/usr/share/doc/libc6/changelog.gz might have solved this particular
problem)
* Software that binds to the first socket found
Then there's software that binds to the first port it gets and is
difficult to teach not to do so. [2]
* The cost of disabling IPv6
Once the kernel has loaded the ipv6 module, one can not get it rmmod'ed
(or not easily - I have not figured out how to do this remotely on a
hosted server). Which means:
a) fiddling with the /etc/mod* mess (I still don't really get it
what is why loaded under which circumstances and when in which
order) to disable IPv6 (nota bene by setting "alias net-pf-10 off"
which in itself contains no semantic value for the unintiated)
b) rebooting
c) unless it works loop back to a)
* Limited usefulnes of IPv6
I would guess that less than one in a thousand users have direct access
to an IPv6 network. Getting connectivity to IPv6 is still non-trivial
(based on my own personal experience).
If a solution makes the life of a a promille of the userbase better at
the expense of a sizeable part of the rest of the userbase (again see
[0] for the technical environments of such "problem" groups), then the
question of the apropriatenes of the solution should be taken into
consideration.
So before pushing IPv6 even further into Debian I ask you to consider
whether the foundation that is laid today is sane enough or whether it
should be improved with priority.
I can think of these alternatives - there may well be other or better
ones:
* ask the user at install time whether he wants IPv6 on
* disable IPv6 by default and make it easy to re-enable
* make IPv6 *easy* to disable
Please don't judge this memorandum based on the fact that the problem in
my specific case might sit in front of the keyboard, and instead please
take into account that a default instalation should *just* run in the most
common cases without the need to tweak - that is without the need to
switch off something as "exotic" as IPv6.
Greets, (I'm not subscribed to debian-release@lists.debian.org, please Cc:
me in case),
*t
[0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/netcfg/+bug/24828
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2000/12/msg01922.html
[2] http://www.google.com/search?q=dccproc+socket(UDP)%3A+Address+family+not+supported+by+protocol
--
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Tomas Pospisek
http://sourcepole.com - Linux & Open Source Solutions
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