On Wed, Feb 09, 2005 at 04:19:38PM -0800,
 Erik Nielsen <Erik@kythra.net> wrote 
 a message of 133 lines which said:

> Is there ANY WAY to disable IPv6 without a kernel recompile?

For your special case, "ssh -4" forces the use of IPv4, allowing you
to see if it's really an IPv6 problem or not.

Many programs have a similar switch.

> In my frustration, I seem to have mis-interpreted the error. The
> actual error is: "Password authentication failed"

To debug a SSH authentication problem:

* on the client, run with 'ssh -v'

* on the server, 'sudo grep ssh /var/log/authlog'

But I do not see how an authentication problem could be related to
IPv6. Unless the TCP wrappers are involved?

> NetBSD 2.0 sparc taking all my not-at-work time for four days Just
> To Install, which was a lot longer than I anticipated.

Sorry for you, it was much faster on my Ultra10.

> it seems like someone decided that IPv6 is the only way to go and is
> on a holy crusade to force as many people to switch to it as
> possible,

I don't know for NetBSD for there are many very good reasons to switch
the Internet to IPv6. The most important one, for me, is the lack of
IPv4 addresses, forcing users to dirty tricks like NAT, and requiring
huge and expensive bureaucracies to decide if you have the right to
have 4 or 8 IPv4 addresses.