When the underlying OS does not support IPv6, ruby should be compiled with: ./configure --enable-ipv6 --with-lookup-order-hack=INET Upstream bug: http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=1698&aid=5627&group_id=426 Thank you
A problem here might be that we can't really determine whether the underlying OS is truely lacking ipv6 support. We can't just go with the ipv6 USE flag since this only indicates whether the user wants to enable specific ipv6 extensions, not whether ipv6 is available and working properly on the OS level. Furthermore this appears to be a bug in glibc? So it should really be reported and fixed there. Ruby just seems to be relaying the information to the getaddrinfo libc call.
*** Bug 278574 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Fixed in 1.9.1_p243.
...and ruby-1.8.7_p174-r1
...and ruby-1.8.6_p388. We now have this in all supported Ruby branches: 1.8.6, 1.8.7 and 1.9. I think the bug can be closed now.