Is it not time for full IPv6 support?

rudi · July 26, 2021, 12:27am

Hi,

Thanks for a good product.
But it is 2021 and the IPv4 address range is not valid anymore in some countries. And here in Sweden I would say we are out of them. As such we are not alone in Eu of this. Most part of Asia are completely out too. Enterprise NAT (dual-nat) is not something to work with and kind of end-of-the-road. So…

Please how is your thoughts on implementing IPv6 (dual stack)?

When?

//Rickard

phillxnet · July 26, 2021, 8:16pm

@rudi Welcome to the Rockstor community.

Re addition of IPv6. We recently intentionally disabled this so that our Web-UI would reflect, and be able to configure, only what was enabled. If you fancy re-enabling and doing you own IPv6 config via nmcli for example all should be OK. But of course there is then a far wider disparity between the systems state and what our Web-UI is able to reflect/configure.

We disable simply via a grub administered kernel command line addition. See:

github.com

rockstor/rockstor-installer/blob/master/rockstor.kiwi#L77


      
          <!--bgrt,breeze,starfield-->
          <bootloader-theme>upstream</bootloader-theme>  <!--gfxboot theme-->
          <!-- https://osinside.github.io/kiwi/building/build_oem_disk.html#oem -->
          <!--bootpartition= is redundant post kiwi issue #1351-->
          <!--firmware="efi" See https://github.com/OSInside/kiwi/issues/1428 re AArch64-->
          <!--Re AArch64: https://github.com/OSInside/kiwi/issues/1491-->
          <type
                  image="oem"
                  primary="true"
                  initrd_system="dracut"
                  filesystem="btrfs"
                  fsmountoptions="noatime"
                  bootloader="grub2"
                  firmware="efi"
                  installiso="true"
                  kernelcmdline="nomodeset plymouth.enable=0 rd.kiwi.oem.maxdisk=5000G"
                  bootpartition="false"
                  devicepersistency="by-label"
                  btrfs_root_is_snapshot="true"
                  btrfs_quota_groups="false"
                  efipartsize="64"

for the x86_64 profiles. You can build your own installer with this removed and should then have full IPv6 capabilities. Although you will be on your own for IPv6 configuration via the command line. Note also that we have slightly modified the postfix config to accomodate for no IPv6. See the following issue for what was done if you need to undo this for your purposes:

github.com/rockstor/rockstor-core

[openSUSE] fix postfix config re ipv4, tlsmgr, & CA file settings. Fixes #2132

rockstor:master ← phillxnet:2132_2133_openSUSE_fix_config_settings_for_postfix

opened 09:36PM - 19 Feb 20 UTC

phillxnet

+805 -553

Thanks to @tyukh for initial reporting and initial diagnosis of the root causes.… Due to differing defaults from our prior CentOS base, email notification configuration failed. Adjust configuration mechanism as below. Fixes #2132 Fixes #2133 Fixes #2035 # Includes: - Un-remark tlsmgr line in master.cf when on openSUSE. - Disable on-by-default mail sysconfig in openSUSE (see issue #2035) - Update /etc files postfix/master.cf & sysconfig/mail only if required. - Adapt Certificate Authority file bundle path to openSUSE contextually. - Enforce "inet_protocols = ipv4" in postfix if a prior 'all' setting is found. This avoids postfix service failure on ipv4 only systems. - Move to string.format in email_client.py. - Black format email_client.py. - Black format system/osi.py (large file) - in separate commit. - Fix buggy use of os.chmod. - Abstract "/root/.forward" for clarity. - Abstract "/etc/postfix/generic" for clarity. - Improve code comments. - Add comments to existing system/osi inplace_replace() function. - Add general purpose replace_line_if_found() facility to system/osi.py. - Establish simple system/osi replace_line_if_found() mechanism. - Avoid postfix log warnings by removing to-be duplicate config options. - Ensure postfix service is enabled after each config save. The vendor default is 'disabled'. Additional unrelated trivial fix without associated issue: - A trivial debug log var refactor omission relating to pr #2039 # Testing No new unit tests were written. However functional testing was performed on all three target dirtos of "rockstor" (CentOS), and our two openSUSE targets: Leap15.1, and Tumbleweed. From a clean source build, post postfix removal and install (fresh config files & to establish systemd vendor default status) the Rockstor Web-UI was able to successfully test email notification config entry, prior to submitting it, and successfully submit that config there after and subsequently perform the test email send. All associated config files were inspected pre and post automated editing and the resulting file access rights were confirmed to be as intended. All 3 platforms, post email notification configuration, were also confirmed to successfully forward self-sent root-directed email using the following procedure: ``` # cli mail client already installed on our CentOS variants zypper in mailx echo "Body text of email alert" | mail -s "Alert Email" root ``` @FroggyFlox Ready for review. I was unfortunately unable to separate the black formatting in the case of the smaller file edited in this pr, but the much larger system/osi.py file does have it's black formatting in a separate commit to ease review.

When we get a contribution to our network subsystems re the capability to configure, via the Web-UI, an IPv4/IPv6 system. See the networking docs section:

https://rockstor.com/docs/network.html

Also note that any changes will have to be accompanied by appropriate tests to prove the function of this rather critical component. All part of the difficulty of covering such a broad range of capabilities in a modern appliance. So in short contributions are welcome and we have the following doc section to help get folks started:

https://rockstor.com/docs/contribute_section.html

Note that we never used to disable IPv6 in our CentOS variant. And had few reports of issues. But in an effort to tighten our Web-UI capability to our underling capability we simply turned IPv6 off. Do please report your findings on turning this back on. And if you intend to make any changes for submission please keep in mind our rock-net capability. Not entirely sure this will be affected actually. That would be a question for @Flox when he is next available.

Thanks for your feedback and note that Rockstor is currently envisaged as being primarily deployed on a private network with only certain ports / services forwarded to the internet if need be.

Hope that helps, and thanks for the info re IPv6 update.

vnt87 · August 11, 2021, 2:46pm

FYI there is a bug with Docker 20.10.6 (which is the current latest version on openSuse) which makes it basically broken for any systems with IPv6 disabled. This effectively disables the entire Rock-ons feature of Rockstor 4 if you follow the vanilla installer recipe.
You can install the rock-ons but they will not run unless you manually modify the run command, using this workaround.
So if you’re interested in using Rock-ons, I’d strongly recommend building your installer using the mod Phillip mentioned above.

kageurufu · August 12, 2021, 9:35pm

To fix a running system, you can ssh as root, then edit /boot/default/grub

remove the ipv6.disable=1 from GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT, on mine I was left with

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="plymouth.enable=0 rd.kiwi.oem.maxdisk=5000G rw"

Then run grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg and reboot

phillxnet · August 14, 2021, 6:54pm

@kageurufu Thanks for the helpful pointer on this one. Much appreciated.

Just a quick correction however. The actual file to edit is not /boot/default/grub (non existent) but:

/etc/default/grub

As per our existing Built on openSUSE dev notes and status Disable IPv6 at the kernel level section, only in reverse of course. So our equivalent ‘undo’ sed command would be:

sed -i 's/ipv6\.disable=1[ ]*//g' /etc/default/grub

Followed by, as you correctly indicate, the grub re-config command of:

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

and a reboot.

Note the ‘undo’ sed accounts for trailing space, or not. The former is the case with our installer:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="ipv6.disable=1 plymouth.enable=0 rd.kiwi.oem.maxdisk=5000G"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

but if folks have used our above dev notes then they will have:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="plymouth.enable=0 rd.kiwi.oem.maxdisk=5000G"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="ipv6.disable=1"

or similar and so no trailing space.

I’ve now added a new section to our above dev notes “To ‘undo’ IPv6 disable at the kernel level” to cover our current issues in rockstor-installer:
https://github.com/rockstor/rockstor-installer/issues/74
and in rockstor-core:
https://github.com/rockstor/rockstor-core/issues/2309

Linking for context here to our current docker related forum report regarding Rock-on failure:

&

Thanks to all concerned for bringing this rather untimely upstream issue to the fore. As can be seen from the above issue texts we are rather in a spot on this one but bit by bit, as always.

Hope that helps.