TechIt

Slow browsing in Ubuntu – debugging a home network install

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I just installed Ubuntu on my laptop, and again I am hit with a slow browsing experience on some networks.

From what I’ve been reading, each time I hit such an issue, the problem is usually that the router(s) supplied and/or on the ISP’s network are not responding to IPv6 “AAAA” requests, and so only after a timeout will a backward-compatible IPv4 “A” request be sent.

All this delay while awaiting the timeout, per request to the internet, has significant imapct on day to day browsing.

You can work around this kind of ISP issue by stopping your machine from sending the IPv6 AAAA requests.

To do this on ubuntu try :

    1. Disable these AAAA/IPV6 requests only for your browser. For firefox, go to

about:config

in the address bar, locate the line starting with

network.dns.disableIPv6

(the filter capability is your friend here) and change the value to

true

    1. Disable these AAAA/IPV6 requests at a system-wide level,

edit

/etc/modprobe.d/aliases

perhaps via

sudo vim /etc/modprobe.d/aliases

or

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/aliases

and change the line

alias net-pf-10 ipv6

to

alias net-pf-10 off

Save the file and you should be motoring nicely again.

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