[geeks] QUESTION: why would a program suddenly start using IPv6?

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

For a long time now, I've used one of my Sun machines as a subversion
server.

I run svnserve instead of the whole apache/subversion/dav mess because
it suits my needs just fine.

At some point in the last few weeks, svnserve stopped answering
requests.  

Today I finally had time to try and diagnose the problem.

I would run the server:

% svnserve -d -r <repository>

...and it wouldn't let anyone connect.

In fact, it wasn't even responding to connectiona attempts.

I finally ran lsof and found out that svnserve was listening on an IPv6
address.

I can fix the problem like this:

% svnserve -d -r <repository> --listen-host <ipv4 server name>

QUESTIONS:

Why would svnserve suddenly start defaulting to an ipv6 address when no
other servers I run do?  svnserve has not been updated, and neither has
its configuration.

I don't run IPv6 anything on purpose, and haven't changed the
configuration on this machine in a long time now.

However, just in case I was "sleep administrating" or something like
that, any idea what I might have changed that would cause this?




-- 
shannon           | An Irishman is never drunk as long as he can hold onto 
                  | one blade of grass and not fall off the face of the earth.