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My ISP provides me with native IPv6 (unfortunately DS-Lite for v4) and I'm using SLAAC for the clients in my local network behind a broadband router.

As I don't trust the router (which is configured by my ISP over TR-691) I have set up ip6tables rules on every client, e.g. limiting SSH access to stations in the same subnet:

$ ip6tables -A services -s 2a02:8071:28c2:5400::/64 -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT

The problem now is that the prefix changes periodically, approx. once a month.

Is there an ip6tables statement that dynamically matches the current prefix(es) of a given interface?

Or how would you handle the changing prefix? I thought of writing an init script that first determines the current prefix through Router-Solicitation an then generates the appropreate ip6tables rules. But this sounds dirty somehow...

lynix
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  • If your systems are all on the same network, why not simply use your link local addresses (fe80::/64) for communication? Or perhaps sign up for a hurricane electric account. They give you an allocation that is static. You could use that space in addition to the space you get from your ISP. – Zoredache Jul 14 '14 at 18:35
  • @AndréDaniel, how do you think HE address space would induce latency on connections between devices on the internal network? You don't even really need to have the HE tunnel enabled. I just mentioned HE, since it is a way to get a free public IPv6 allocation you could use for your internal network. – Zoredache Jul 14 '14 at 18:49
  • @Zoredache yeah sorry I misunderstood you, I was thinking about using the HE tunnel to replace the ISP-provided IPv6 and using it for external connections. –  Jul 14 '14 at 18:52
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    Maybe use a cron job to check if the prefix has changed every hour and change the rule if that's the case ? –  Jul 14 '14 at 18:53
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    Or generate a ULA prefix for internal use. That is usually easier than link-local addresses. – Sander Steffann Jul 14 '14 at 18:56
  • I would complain very loudly to the ISP. As a business you should be getting an IPv6 prefix that doesn't change if you need it (and you do). – Michael Hampton Jul 14 '14 at 21:29
  • Thanks for your hints. I need to clarify: this is not enterprise, it's for my home broadband access (cable), so no ISP that would allocate me a better address range. Using link-local addresses is bad because I'd like to access SSH on one machine from "outside" (internet) and therefore can't use the link-local address. – lynix Jul 15 '14 at 16:07

1 Answers1

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In theory, the right way to handle this is with DHCP Prefix Delegation and dynamic DNS.

So, it would work like this:

1) your router linux instance requests an IPv6 address as well as an IPv6 prefix delegation from the ISP on interface A

2) it assigns one /64 from the delegated prefix to interface B, which has all the other machines. It advertises this prefix via RA packets and/or via the DHCP server daemon of your choice

3) clients grab IPv6 addresses and register themselves in local DNS by hostname, or respond to mDNS requests for that name if they're running bonjour, Avahi, etc.

4) firewall rules and pretty much any other network-related configuration is based on host names, not IP addresses. This is the IPv6 way: DNS names good, literal addresses bad because they are hard to remember and type.

The major problem you'll find is that iptables and ip6tables only support hostname-based rules by resolving hostnames once during rule installation. So you'll probably have to write some script to re-install rules whenever the prefix changes. Worse, if a host is offline or not resolvable by mDNS or DDNS at rule install time, things will break silently.

In short, ip(6)tables is just plain broken for any case where IP addresses change, even on IPv4. This means it is broken for any network of reasonable size, at least on a system acting as a router.

Lots of commercial firewall products handle this use case much better (even though many are linux based, such as SonicWall). I suspect they simply re-resolve FQDNs periodically based on TTL and update IPtables or their custom networking kernel modules.

rmalayter
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