I originally posted this over 4 hours earlier, so Lets try this again.
Is this a problem with sbc news servers? Original article:

Most of the rest of the world is not up to IPv6. I am wondering if one
can disable use of IPv6 without recompiling the kernel. I have looked
on news grous and did not see anything. I was hoping that 3.5 might be
new enough that it have an option to disable IPv6.

The reason that I want to disable IPv6 is that some programs take
several mintues to complete an operation when using IPv6. The main
problem appears to be that DNS IPv6 packets are not answered and it
takes a long time for the retry and so forth. For example, to do a
'whois yahoo.com', it would take about two minutes. Also, I was going
to setup apache 2.0.49 as a proxy; however, it takes a couple of minutes
to get a single page due to this problem. (I have watched the packets
via tcpdump.)

Also, if I know that IPv6 DNS will not get answered, it would seem
inneficient to even try IPv6 first. Why not skip to IPv4?

As a separate note, doing nslookup on host being looked up by whois
completes in less than a second. I suspect that whois and apache httpd
might make a different call to for host name resolution than most programs.

JoeSmith <JoeSmith@IDontWantSpam.bogus.bogusaddress.com> wrote in message news:<TfoBc.2629$wJ1.460@newssvr25.news.prodigy.co m>...
> I originally posted this over 4 hours earlier, so Lets try this again.
> Is this a problem with sbc news servers? Original article:
>
> Most of the rest of the world is not up to IPv6. I am wondering if one
> can disable use of IPv6 without recompiling the kernel. I have looked
> on news grous and did not see anything. I was hoping that 3.5 might be
> new enough that it have an option to disable IPv6.
>
> The reason that I want to disable IPv6 is that some programs take
> several mintues to complete an operation when using IPv6. The main
> problem appears to be that DNS IPv6 packets are not answered and it
> takes a long time for the retry and so forth. For example, to do a
> 'whois yahoo.com', it would take about two minutes. Also, I was going
> to setup apache 2.0.49 as a proxy; however, it takes a couple of minutes
> to get a single page due to this problem. (I have watched the packets
> via tcpdump.)
>
> Also, if I know that IPv6 DNS will not get answered, it would seem
> inneficient to even try IPv6 first. Why not skip to IPv4?
>
> As a separate note, doing nslookup on host being looked up by whois
> completes in less than a second. I suspect that whois and apache httpd
> might make a different call to for host name resolution than most programs.

To answer your question: when I went looking for similar info, I found
no way to disable IPv6 other than the (straightforward, if not
instantaneous) kernel reconfig. That was for 3.3 and/or 3.4.

Having said that, something's fishy about your name lookups taking so
long. There is no reason resolution should default to IPv6 packets
unless it's been told to. What's in your /etc/resolv.conf? The
nameserver lines should list IPv4 addresses in dotted-decimal
notation.

One glitch is that by default, the IPv6 lines for localhost and maybe
other entries get into /etc/hosts above the IPv4 lines. I suppost that
*could* be part of your problem, somehow. Move the IPv6 lines to the
bottom of /etc/hosts and see if that helps.

I found IPv6 a minor distraction (extra lines in output from netstat,
ifconfig, etc). I turned it off mostly on the principle of not running
what I wasn't going to use.

Chip C
Toronto