CCF Archive Site

One thing I started to notice about Linux several months ago (and I'm not certain the problem existed or not before that) was that almost all browser pages took forever to load. Even the leanest page I had just looked at would take 2-3 seconds to come up.

I started to watch the bottom Firefox status bar and it would stay stuck for an eternity on "Looking up veeblefetzer.com". It could be any site. Even something big like maps.google.com.

I tried both the Google DNS name servers, as well as OpenDNS's name servers. No difference in behavior.

I started looking on search for a fix, and mainly I've found randomness about this problem online.

I stumbled into one thing cited as fix: disabling "dnsmasq" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnsmasq

Apparently it's a DNS cache and forwarder.  I made the config changes to disable #dnsmasq and no effect.

Finally I had an epiphany. In the connections applet and the connection info dialog I noticed that my box has an ipv6 address in addition to the (legacy, old-timey) ipv4 address.

DID *I* HAVE IPV6 IN THE HOUSE ON MY CONNECTION?

Well, here's what I realized:

My "front-end" router that connects to the cable modem is a DLink DIR-655 router. Last firmware update (the last known one, too) is from 2013. The router was purchased (probably at Costco) in 2009.

I looked up the router and it almost certainly does not support IPV6.

However, my cable modem does, according to the info on the model number.  But IPV6 isn't getting out of our house to the internet.

I found instructions for disabling IPV6 locally on my Linux system. In /etc/sysctl.conf:

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1

PROBLEM SOLVED. Lookups and web browsing are comparatively like greased lightning now.

(Strangely the IPV6 settings and address are still present in the connections info on the desktop. But this change supposedly disables IPV6 entirely at the system level.)

I do need to upgrade that old router, though. It's only 2.4 GHZ and the signal isn't that strong throughout the house.

In 2018 and ipv6  *should* work with most connections. I checked and our cable provider (Spectrum) claims that IPV6 is almost 100% across what they call its "footprint".

I suspect that the networking stuff in Linux is attempting an ipv6 DNS lookup and stalling and timing out - because the house router doesn't handle it correctly - before dropping down to ipv4.