[TriLUG] IPv6 Networking on CentOS (RHEL)

[Jym Williams Zavada]

I don't consider myself an IPv6 expert by any means, but it's my 
understanding that IPv6 relies on router advertisement and router 
solicitation for routing.  On my network, once I set up the router for the 
IPv6 allocation, the rest of the IPv6-enabled machines then automatically 
set up their IPv6 routes.

If I happen to be wrong about this, I'm sure one of our IPv6 gurus will pipe 
up. (Kevin Otte, are your ears burning yet? :).

-Jym Williams Zavada



On Tue, 20 Dec 2011 at 09:22, Brian Weaver wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I'm the resident OS guy at the office where I work and I've been tasking 
> with adding IPv6 support to our appliance which uses CentOS as its base 
> system. Most of the network setup has been very straightforward. I have a 
> curses program, written in Perl, that the customer uses to configure their 
> network setting. Gathering the information isn't really hard but I've 
> noticed some differences with network scripts that setup the IPv4 
> addressing when compared with the IPv6 addressing.
>
> I'll admit that I'm not an IPv6 expert so I'm wondering if it's just an 
> oversight or if the differences are by design. The particular area where 
> I'm running into issues is allowing the user to add their own static 
> routes. For the IPv4 static routes I stored the customer's route 
> information in the file '/etc/sysconfig/static-routes'. The static routing 
> information for IPv4 is stored so that the first argument on any line is 
> the device associated with the route (eth0, eth1, etc) or the keyword 
> 'any'. If the device is 'any' then when the network is started by the init 
> script those routes are added.
>
> The static routing file for IPv6 does not appear to support adding what 
> I'll term as global routes (the 'any' device) when networking is started 
> via the init script. The '/etc/sysconfig/static-routes-ipv6' file is only 
> processed by the ifup-ipv6 script when an interface is assigned an IPv6 
> address, and it only processes routes assigned to the device passed to the 
> ifup-ipv6 script. I guess I'm wondering why there is a difference 
> w/regards to the IPv6 static routes as compared to the IPv4 static routes?
>
> -- Cmdr Clueless