DNS trouble. Caused by ipv6?

Hello.
I have installed a fresh copy of openSUSE 11.4 “Celadon” and am having trouble getting the Internet to work. I was having similar difficulty with a previous installation of Debian which I gave up on. I wish to stick with Suse as it doesn’t overheat my laptop (which is quite the achievement). When I try to go to a web page it says that it can’t resolve the address (ie dns isn’t working for some reason). I searched around and found other people saying that that has to do with ipv6 not being supported by my internet provider which is probably the case. Sure enough when I disable ipv6 in Firefox I can browse the internet with no problem were as before pages would not load at all. Now if I truely understand the problem all I have to do now is disable it for the entire system. I have searched the Internet for this and have come away with about 50 different aproaches of which I have all tried. Let me see if I can list them.
I have tried adding “ipv6.disable=1” to my grub options.
I have tried adding “net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1” to /etc/sysctl.conf
I have tried echoing 1 to /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/disable_ipv6
I have tried adding lines like “alias net-pf-10 off” to modprob files in variouse locations such as /etc/modprobe.conf
I have checked the disable ipv6 check box in YaST2 Control Center.
I have even added a script someone posted which works in conjunction with the Network Manager coming on and off line.

Even with all these in place and multiple reboots YaST in gui mode isn’t able to resolve host names in order to obtain packages and firefox is only operative if it is manually set to disable ipv6.

Puppy linux was working fine on the Internet except that it would overheat the computer. Suse doesn’t overheat but so far is non functional. I would like this to work so I can keep from reinstalling windows. Any clues anyone has or additional clues I could provide?

I have IPv6 still enabled, though my ISP does not support it.

I don’t think disabling for your system is the issue.

It is more likely that either your router or your ISP is bungling DNS when there are IPv6 queries. My ISP happens to be using bind, which handles it ok.

Many routers act as DNS forwarders, and some of them mess up with IPv6. Some ISPs mess up.

You might try putting the google DNS servers directly in your “/etc/resolv.conf” to see whether that helps.

Add these lines to “/etc/resolv.conf”


nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4

and perhaps remove any existing “nameserver” lines from there.

Before you make these changes, save a copy of your existing “resolv.conf” for reference purposes.

Thank you so much. That did it. YaST now downloads and firefox doesn’t need to be IPv6 disabled. You’ve made my day.

I’m glad that worked.

It’s possible that it will break when you next boot, due to DHCP recreating “/etc/resolv.conf”. If that happens, you now know how to fix it. There are comment lines in “/etc/resolv.conf” that tell you how to avoid having your changes overwritten.