C
Charles McColm
Guest
I work for a not-for-profit that has a community tools project refurbishing computers. A few years ago I set up a dude with a Linux system. The guy had recently suffered a nasty injury in MMA and had some time on his hands to work at home. He mentioned that he was tired of always getting viruses so we hooked him up with a Linux box. After a couple of days the guy called us up and said he couldn't get on the Internet. The technician who hooked up his connection blamed it on his Linux box. The dude watched as the technician was able to connect to the Internet connection using his Windows laptop, so it appeared that the technician was correct - there must have been something wrong with the Linux machine...
I don't normally do house-calls, but it upset me that the technician was trying to give Linux a bad rap. So I went out to investigate the problem. Just as the dude said, the Linux box wasn't connecting to the Internet. His VOIP phone had no issues and given that the technician was able to successfully connect using his Windows laptop I was starting to think maybe there was an issue with the Linux system we built.
About 12 minutes in I was baffled. Then it dawned on me that it could indeed be an equipment issue. The dude's Linux box was connecting to the Internet through the VOIP router which was in turn connected to the ADSL modem. When I connected the Linux box directly to the ADSL modem it almost instantly connected to the Internet. While connected I did a little research on the model of the VOIP router and turned up several pages of complaints about a broken IPv6 stack on the router.
I reconnected everything back up as it initially was, plugged the Linux box back in the VOIP router and sure enough, no Internet connection. So I set the network connection to prefer IPv4 over IPv6 and sure enough it connected. In a roundabout way you could say it was Linux's fault since the VOIP router probably ran Linux and since (at the time) the distribution we used seem to prefer IPv6 connections, but ultimately it was really a vendor equipment issue, not the computer that was at fault.
About a year later the dude came in for another computer. We're also a MRR (Microsoft Registered Refurbisher) and I fully expected him to pick a Windows computer (we hadn't heard from him since the networking issue), but nope, he said he was really happy with the last Linux box and bought another.
I don't normally do house-calls, but it upset me that the technician was trying to give Linux a bad rap. So I went out to investigate the problem. Just as the dude said, the Linux box wasn't connecting to the Internet. His VOIP phone had no issues and given that the technician was able to successfully connect using his Windows laptop I was starting to think maybe there was an issue with the Linux system we built.
About 12 minutes in I was baffled. Then it dawned on me that it could indeed be an equipment issue. The dude's Linux box was connecting to the Internet through the VOIP router which was in turn connected to the ADSL modem. When I connected the Linux box directly to the ADSL modem it almost instantly connected to the Internet. While connected I did a little research on the model of the VOIP router and turned up several pages of complaints about a broken IPv6 stack on the router.
I reconnected everything back up as it initially was, plugged the Linux box back in the VOIP router and sure enough, no Internet connection. So I set the network connection to prefer IPv4 over IPv6 and sure enough it connected. In a roundabout way you could say it was Linux's fault since the VOIP router probably ran Linux and since (at the time) the distribution we used seem to prefer IPv6 connections, but ultimately it was really a vendor equipment issue, not the computer that was at fault.
About a year later the dude came in for another computer. We're also a MRR (Microsoft Registered Refurbisher) and I fully expected him to pick a Windows computer (we hadn't heard from him since the networking issue), but nope, he said he was really happy with the last Linux box and bought another.
