Re: IPv6 in Debian

[Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>]

On Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 07:52:47PM +0200, Tomas Pospisek wrote:
> 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?

Sorry, but there shouldn't be a problem.

AAAA before A is the recommended way of resolving a domain name. Not
doing so would make us not RFC-compliant, which is not the way to go
IMO.

If you're having problems contacting a host because your machine tries
to connect to a v6 host which is unavailable, then that means there is a
configuration problem either locally (because you've configured your
host to think it has a route to the global v6 net when in reality it
doesn't) or remotely on the server (when it publishes an AAAA record for
a v6 IP which is unavailable).

Alternatively, there's a bug in the particular piece of software you're
using; in that case, please report it.

In all other cases, your machine should do the AAAA resolving, try to
connect, _immediately_ get a "no route to host", and fall back to v4. I
don't see the 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]

That's a bug in that software. All software should be able to be told to
bind to a specific address.

[...]
> * 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).

Actually, in Japan and Korea there are users that don't have v4 access
anymore. It is indeed quite academic in Europe at this point, but that
doesn't make it universally useless.

-- 
<Lo-lan-do> Home is where you have to wash the dishes.
  -- #debian-devel, Freenode, 2004-09-22