Two IPv6 addresses defined? Try this

If you have an IPv6 network set up, the likelihood is that you are making use of Router Advertisements to allow your systems to automatically grab an IP address.

However, if you then statically assign an IPv6 address to a server, for example, you end up with two IPv6 addresses … which seems to me to be very messy. Deleting the dynamically assigned address seems to be pretty difficult … you can delete the DNS entry to try to stop other systems using it, but the DNS entry will come back.

The answer lies with netsh. All you need to do is run this command:

netsh interface ipv6 set interface <x> routerdiscovery=disabled

where <x> is the index for the interface. This can easily be found with the command:

netsh interface ipv6 show interface

This will stop the server from listening for those Router Advertisements and automatically remove the dynamic address.

The importance of keeping drivers current

I’ve just been writing a review of Synology’s DS1511+ NAS unit for Digital Media Thoughts and I wanted to really throw some data at it to see how it performed. I’ve got my media PC connected to the NAS over a 1Gb switch, with multiple SATA drives connected to the PC.

Using TeraCopy, I set up four copies – one for each of the SATA drives – to a single volume on the NAS. However, copying was not entirely successful – it would work for a while and then seem to just give up. Disabling and enabling the Ethernet interface on the PC seemed to get things going again for a while but it wouldn’t last.

Looking at the drive for the RealTek Ethernet interface, I noticed that it was quite an old driver, dated 2007. Looking in their web site, I could see that they had much newer versions, which I then downloaded and installed onto the PC.

The difference was fantastic. All four copies went smoothly, taking the average network utilization up to around 80% or 800Mb/s. A big improvement for such a small amount of effort.

It just goes to show … it doesn’t hurt to periodically check the drivers on your system to see if any of them have newer versions. You might be surprised at the results.