Description of problem: When doing a fresh f7 install on a workstation with 1 NIC, and deselecting "enable IPv6 on this interface" the assumption is that IPv6 will not be enabled, yet the service ip6tables is started and ifconfig displays an IPv6 address for the interface. How reproducible: Every time Steps to Reproduce: 1. During the install, deselect "Enable IPv6 on this interface" 2. Finish the normal install and reboot Actual results: After each successive reboot, during init, ip6tables takes "forever" to load and eventually gives an [OK] at the end of the line, but looking through the logs, you can see a message similar to "No IPv6 routers present". Expected results: If you disable IPv6 during the install, this should act as the "master switch" to disable IPv6-related installation/configuration on the workstation. Additional info: I'm not sure how most people view hat checkbox during the install. If we are viewing is as the "master switch" then it doesn't work as expected. This goes to the heart of whether or not we may need an option to truly disable IPv6, perhaps for those people who have no IPv6 equipment/routers/other workstations, etc.
This was a topic of confusion in the Fedora Development tree leading up to Fedora 7. The checkbox in the installer is not meant to be a master switch, but rather a control for the network bringup commands that are about to run. If you select Enable IPv6 during installation, anaconda will try to obtain an IPv6 address. Some people don't want the installer to even try this, so the option to disable IPv6 configuration during installation is there. Right now in Fedora, both IPv4 and IPv6 things are enabled by default. Users should not have to care whether the IPv4 or IPv6 stacks are enabled or disabled, likewise with the ip6tables service. Both stacks are considered part of the all-encompassing network configuration. In past releases, users could disable the IPv6 stack, but we're not doing that anymore. Having the IPv6 stack active doesn't affect anything, but if you really need to disable it in your environment, you can prevent loading the ipv6.ko kernel module at boot time. All IPv6-dependent things won't load if that module isn't loaded.
thank you for the clarification. where would i begin trying to figure out why ip6tables takes so long to load (since i have not other ipv6-enabled workstations or routers on this network)?
I would suggest searching bugzilla for other open bugs against ip6tables. May be a known issue. Failing that, contact the package maintainer (usually the first email address listed in the changelog of the package...you can get the changelog this way: rpm -q --changelog ip6tables).