Proxmox and the fun maze of IPv6 connectivity
By Emanuele “Lele” Calò
July 8, 2013
While working on the Proxmox machine setup and specifically on the IPv6 connectivity I found a problem where after a reboot I always kept getting the *** net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding*** and all related variable set to ***0***, thus giving lots of IPv6 network connectivity issues on the guests.
While brainstorming with a colleague on this, we discovered in the boot logs these few messages which are quite indicative of something horrible happening at boot:
# less /var/log/boot.0
[..]
Mon Jul 8 18:38:59 2013: Setting kernel variables ...sysctl: cannot stat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/forwarding: No such file or directory
Mon Jul 8 18:38:59 2013: sysctl: cannot stat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/default/forwarding: No such file or directory
Mon Jul 8 18:38:59 2013: sysctl: cannot stat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/default/autoconf: No such file or directory
Mon Jul 8 18:38:59 2013: sysctl: cannot stat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/default/accept_dad: No such file or directory
Mon Jul 8 18:38:59 2013: sysctl: cannot stat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/default/accept_ra: No such file or directory
Mon Jul 8 18:38:59 2013: sysctl: cannot stat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/default/accept_ra_defrtr: No such file or directory
Mon Jul 8 18:38:59 2013: sysctl: cannot stat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/default/accept_ra_rtr_pref: No such file or directory
Mon Jul 8 18:38:59 2013: sysctl: cannot stat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/default/accept_ra_pinfo: No such file or directory
Mon Jul 8 18:38:59 2013: sysctl: cannot stat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/default/accept_source_route: No such file or directory
Mon Jul 8 18:38:59 2013: sysctl: cannot stat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/default/accept_redirects: No such file or directory
Mon Jul 8 18:38:59 2013: sysctl: cannot stat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/autoconf: No such file or directory
Mon Jul 8 18:38:59 2013: sysctl: cannot stat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/accept_dad: No such file or directory
Mon Jul 8 18:38:59 2013: sysctl: cannot stat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/accept_ra: No such file or directory
Mon Jul 8 18:38:59 2013: sysctl: cannot stat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/accept_ra_defrtr: No such file or directory
Mon Jul 8 18:38:59 2013: sysctl: cannot stat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/accept_ra_rtr_pref: No such file or directory
Mon Jul 8 18:38:59 2013: sysctl: cannot stat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/accept_ra_pinfo: No such file or directory
Mon Jul 8 18:38:59 2013: sysctl: cannot stat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/accept_source_route: No such file or directory
Mon Jul 8 18:38:59 2013: sysctl: cannot stat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/accept_redirects: No such file or directory
Mon Jul 8 18:38:59 2013: done.
[..]
The following steps would be to either crawl through the “inextricable” maze of the ProxMox (PVE) boot initrd image and probably came up with the solution or find a quick way to deal with this in a clean way without touching the boot process.
Since it was all due to sysctl being called too early in the boot process and then not finding proper IPv6 module already loaded calling it again later would suffice. So I simply added the following line to /etc/network/interfaces
iface eth0 inet6 static
address YOUR:IPV6:IS:HERE
netmask 64
up ip -6 route add default via fe80::1 dev eth0
up sysctl -p # <------ ADDED THIS LINE TO FIX IPv6 CONNECTIVITY ISSUES
And there it goes. Reboot once again to verify and you should be all set.
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