So, I have this server at Online, a french hosting company, part of Illiad. They do an all-around amazing job hosting servers, their interface is great, they datacenters are top-notch, etc.
But like every other hosting company out there, IPv6 isn’t yet a first-class citizen. Oh, it’s supported all right. The official way to make it work involves not one, not two, but three configuration methods:
- The address must be configured statically, manually
- They use Prefix Delegation (PD), so you have to run a DHCPv6 client to get the prefix delegated to you
- And then you need to get a default route, and since they don’t implement the DHCPv6 extension for this (yet?) so you have to accept SLAAC (stateless address autoconfiguration) Router Advertisements (RAs).
So, generally, on Linux, this is a bit of a hassle. You come and configure your static address, the kernel accepts RAs by default so that’s taken care of, and then you configure a DHCPv6 client (they have a nice tutorial for that) and you’re good to go.
Of course, there’s a catch: the title of that post says “with libvirt” and I wouldn’t have written a blog post to tell you “they have a good tutorial, just follow it!”.
So libvirt is a common interface for a bunch of virtualization technologies (Xen, Qemu/KVM, bhyve, virtualbox, etc…). It also does a bunch of nice stuff for you, like set up a SPLICE or a VNC server for each VM, handle the resource management in a standardized way, all that stuff. But it also handles the network stuff for you. Which is really nice in a way, since it sets up a bridge for the VMs to communicate, firewall rules for forwarding and stuff, a DHCP server for the VMs, etc. And you can configure it however you want! I can just bridge out to the NIC, or setup a v4 NAT, or whatever. It’s really nice. But then you turn on IPv6 on your libvirt network config. And just like that, poof, your host v6 connectivity goes down.
That’s weird. Reboot, the v6 connectivity doesn’t even go up! Even tho you have an address and … wait, the default route is gone?
Yeah, so here’s the catch. libvirt, when it starts up and one of the configured networks has v6 enabled, launches a Router Advertisement daemon (radvd) and starts sending RAs to all host interfaces. TO ALL OF THE HOST’S INTERFACES!! But it doesn’t know any default route to advertise to the egress interface, so it just sends a RA without a default route. And, of course, Linux sees that and overwrites the old default route it received from the older RA, cause of course a newer RA would have better information, even if it says it has no route.
Anyway, so now there isn’t an easy answer to this, so I went the cheap and
dirty route : I disabled the libvirtd service, and wrote the following into my
/etc/network/interfaces:
iface eth0 inet6 static
address 2001:bc8:30b9:<whatever>/64
accept_ra 2
post-up ip6tables-restore < /etc/ip6tables.conf
post-up sleep 30; \
echo $(ip -6 r | grep default | cut -d ' ' -f 3) > /tmp/v6_route ; \
systemctl start libvirtd; \
sleep 10; \
ip -6 r a default via $(cat /tmp/v6_route)
pre-down ip6tables-save > /etc/ip6tables.conf
(yeah, I know the code block is )
So, okay. Please, consider this. Yes, this is absolutely disgusting. But it works.
Please don’t hit me
Anyways if you were looking for a way to make this work, here it is.