I may well not have fully figured out what was going on in this particular situation. Mostly because I got tired of trying to sort out the endless mysteries of IPv6 running under XP Service Pack 2. Teredo may or may not have been at issue. I saw some analyses indicating this might have been the case. In any event, after backing it and IPv6 out, all was well. fh -----------------

[hmmmm how come I didn't parse any operational content in this post...]

Fred Heutte wrote: [..]

...

I spent a couple hours in a hotel recently trying to untangle why using the DSL system I could see the net but couldn't get to any sites other than a few I tried at random like the BBC, Yahoo and Google.

That's because they are among the few that apparently have IPv6 enabled web systems.

They don't have "IPv6 enabled web systems", a lot of people wished that they did. What your problem most likely was, was a broken DNS server, which, when queried for an AAAA simply doesn't respond.

Most Network Operators (to keep it a bit on topic for this mailinglist) can't do anything about broken DNS servers at End User sites.

Note that this has *nothing* to do with Teredo, which even doesn't activate itself when it can't get packets to be relayed. You can't thus blame Microsoft for this. The DNS server is broken, not them. I know it is always fun to blame M$ but really it isn't true.

Note also that the BBC once did have a AAAA related DNS problem, that was in 2002 though and was quickly resolved: http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/2002-04/msg00559.html These had another kind of problem, they returned NXDOMAIN, so that it looked like the requested label was not there; much better still than the simple ignore and forget of the End User DNS problems.

...

I was once, circa 1995 or so, fairly enamored of IPv6. Now it makes me wonder just exactly what problem it is good at solving.

Primarily only one: a *lot* more address space. Enough to provide our children's children children and the rest of the world with unique addressable address space. Nothing more nothing less.

...

Don't get me wrong -- it's not the fault of IPv6 and its designers and advocates, it's that the world has moved on and other methods have been found for the questions it was designed to address.

As it primarily resolves the address space problem and it solves this perfectly well, how exactly did your world move on by staying limited to 32bits and only 4 million addresses while there are many more people on this planet, not even thinking of subnets or having multiple addresses per person?

Greets, Jeroen