Re: Debian 11: How to disable IPv6
Hi Gene,
Before we go any further let's just remember that this thread was
started by someone wanting to disable IPv6 for no specific reason.
They had decided they needed to do so to fix some problem they were
having, when in fact they had ALREADY disabled IPv6, so there is no
possibility whatsoever that IPv6 was responsible for whatever
problem they were seeing.
This kind of mindset is counter productive, even if you have found a
brother in IPv6-hating arms.
Your advocacy of disabling IPv6 "just because" is wrong on every
level; it is necessary in virtually no circumstance¹. But you're
also doing it on a thread which conclusively has nothing to do with
IPv6. Hopefully you can see why this seems like a bit of a theme
with you.
On Sat, Jul 09, 2022 at 03:59:48PM -0400, gene heskett wrote:
> Andy, you obviously don't live in ipv4 only territory.
I travel a lot so am often on networks with no external IPv6.
Nothing breaks for me.
> Until n-m or whatever gets trained to auto switch to ipv4 if 6
> fails,
Nothing should break when there is no IPv6 connectivity. If it does,
you almost certainly have something misconfigured. You have spent a
lot of time telling this list how you disable IPv6 but have never
managed to demonstrate an actual problem that required you to do
so.
> Until such time as our local ISP's offer it, we have no choice but
> to disable it. It really is that simple.
Things can seem very simple when you have a completely incorrect
understanding.
I started typing this email in a client's house on a network I don't
control, that does not have IPv6. My laptop has no special
configuration to either make IPv6 work nor to disable it. Since then
I returned home, to my network which does have IPv6, and carried on
typing the email.
This is the default behaviour of Linux for a decade or more. You are
very unlikely to have to change any setting to have things work this
way. It really is that simple.
Of course, on your systems which will stay on your network, with an
Internet service provider that does not offer IPv6, there may be
very little point to having IPv6 be a thing. You're probably losing
very little by disabling it². But your claims that it routinely
breaks things or causes problems when there's no external IPv6
connectivity are just wrong. This is all designed to be used when
it's available and not really be noticed either way.
Cheers,
Andy
¹ It is certainly possible for some site's IPv6 to break while its
IPv4 has not, and it's possible for that situation to stay in
effect longer because fewer people use IPv6, so it can go on for
longer before it's noticed.
For many years web browsers have used a thing called Happy
Eyeballs where they try both v6 and v4 and use the one that works
first/better, so it has to be a quite specific failure mode to
make just v6 bad. But it can happen.
Similarly as another poster pointed out, all software can have
bugs, and sometimes some specific thing just doesn't behave
correctly over IPv6.
So I can't say it NEVER EVER breaks in ANY way for ANYONE, but
what I can say is that it's almost always a bad idea to disable it
"just because", and neither this thread nor anything you have ever
posted here has described a specific instance where IPv6 broke
anything.
If you're going to dispute this, it would be good to come up with
a specific reproducible example. I'm not saying such examples
don't exist - they've happened to me. But if it does happen then
we can help work out how to fix it without just disabling IPv6.
Otherwise I'm afraid your claims about IPv6 so far have been quite
bizarre, on the level of "IPv6 ate my homework" or "my father was
killed by a 128-bit integer", and can't be taken seriously.
² Not nothing though. At some point your ISP might enable IPv6 or
you might change to one that does, at which point if you had not
taken steps to disable it, your machines would start using it
without you noticing. There would be some advantages to that
happening, though usually not big ones.
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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