"I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but Windows 7 shipped around the same time I got married, and it includes a fascinating new technology called HomeGroup. Its goal is really simple: get all your home computers sharing documents, media, and printers with each other, in a way that is both secure and straightforward. But Microsoft also has a deeper aim here: they're trying to finally kill off the decrepit NetBIOS technology that's at the heart of most Windows sharing problems. So let's have a look at HomeGroup and the technologies involved that make it work. And just to keep things interesting, we'll compare HomeGroup with what Mac OS X offers."
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Member since:2007-04-23
This simply shouldn't happen.. IPv6 when enabled should remain dormant until a device on the network advertises a route to it (ipv6 router advertisement)...
If you're having problems, chances are some device on your network is advertising a bogus ipv6 route which your system is trying to use... This is analogous to having a rogue dhcp server which is connecting you to an isolated network.
Member since:2010-03-08
You could well be right, especially considering that this a cheap modem/router that my ISP rents for €3/month, and that when I acquired it IPv6 was even more of a thing for nerds than it is now.
However, the parent poster experienced such issue on several networks+lappy combinations, so it seems that there are many buggy IPv6 devices in the wild.
And the most interesting is probably that the thing is OS-dependent in a non-trivial fashion : on my previous computer, DHCP+IPv6 was okay on various Linux distros but led to the 30s delay on Windows XP. But on my brother's laptop, the reverse phenomenon occurs : network is buggy on most linux distros but okay on WinXP.
Well, that's the joy of computer networking...
Member since:2009-06-18
In the cases I saw, the symptoms were a bit different. The machine would connect to the wireless network, and operate fine for a few minutes, and then trail off and stop working. Sometimes reconnecting would work, but more often than not it would be unable to get an IP when it tried to reconnect.
In one instance I know that the only other device on the whole network was the wireless router itself, and it understood IPv4 exclusively. The laptop still had trouble until IPv6 was turned off on the wireless NIC. The laptop worked fine here before that though. Who knows...
Edited 2010-09-24 21:39 UTC
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Member since:
2010-03-08
Not only on Windows. I also had some issues with my ISP-provided router when using computers running linux. On some machines, DNS resolving when connected through it takes 30s, unless you disable either IPv6 or DHCP.