This is an informational mail that I hope helps some people since this problem had been bothering me for a long time and I just solved it for myself. Bug#435646 shows up high (#1) in certain Google search results and I believe the submitter of merged Bug#470289 had the same issue as me.
Since glibc v2.3.3, getaddrinfo() has included a feature to disable AAAA requests if there are no interfaces with IPv6 addresses; the feature is turned on by a flag called AI_ADDRCONFIG. The patch in Bug#435646 that was installed and then reverted was about changing the behavior of AI_ADDRCONFIG so that it only includes *globally-scoped* addresses in this check. (Some people do talk to localhost via IPv6 so this patch doesn't work.) When IPv6 is disabled in the kernel via "alias net-pf-10 off", there are no IPv6 addresses *period*, so the original unpatched getaddrinfo() should already work. Having not fully understood the issue before, I lamented the rejection of the patch, thinking this was about disabling AAAA even if there are no IPv6 addresses period --- because various apps *do* make AAAA requests with IPv6 completely disabled in the kernel! But as it turns out, the regular feature has already existed since glibc 2.3.3. Here's the answer: users of getaddrinfo() aren't using the feature! It's only enabled by default if hints=NULL, otherwise you have to enable it explicitly with hints->flags = AI_ADDRCONFIG. Each application that uses getaddrinfo() needs to pass in the AI_ADDRCONFIG flag, and programmers may not know about it. I think getaddrinfo() should read from gai.conf to allow this to enabled system-wide. Until then, I've written a kludge that can be installed in LD_PRELOAD or /etc/ld.so.preload to force on this flag (and an alternate kludge to just always turn off AAAA queries). http://git.cubewano.org/git/gai-no6 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
