[TriLUG] IPv6 Networking on CentOS (RHEL)

[Brian Weaver]

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