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Saturday, May 06, 2006

An *Ubuntu Home Network #1

The goal: A couple of Ubuntu 5.10 boxes for the wrinkled ones. A couple of Edubuntu boxes for the rugrats, all to be connected together via WIFI and share an ADSL modem connection to the internet. A proxy setup with Dansguard or similar for the Edubuntus.

A tidy little weekend project...That might not get done in a weekend.

I'll post the highlights of the highs and lows here, starting with this one:

Firefox Sloth Mode Headscratch

Installing the *Ubuntu's went off without any problems whatsoever. Auto-detected the wifi cards etc. Some problems getting the boxes to see each other but that is down to coverage issues from my coverage-challenged WIFI access point.

The first significant problem was with firefox which was painfully slow connecting to websites. At first I suspected a DNS lookup problem but the dig utility ruled that one out. Firefox hanging for ages on "looking up example.com" has a way of steering you towards DNS.

The real problem turned out to be IPV6 lookup. Firefox will do IPV6 lookup by default (and take about 30 seconds to fallback to IPV4 if your router doesn't grok IPV6).

You will need to turn that puppy off unless your router is IPV6 enabled.

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