IPv6 and CARP crashes boxes

[Jim Pingle]

On 5/31/2012 5:31 PM, Damien Fleuriot wrote:
> On 31 May 2012, at 22:31, Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> On 31 May 2012 06:42, Damien Fleuriot <ml at my.gd> wrote:
>>> Hey list,
>>>
>>> The thread about "Why Are You Using FreeBSD", listing the pros and cons
>>> of FBSD, has brought back a topic to mind.
>>>
>>> Recently (read, < 3 months ago) I was experimenting with IPv6 and CARP
>>> on 8.x boxes and that crashed them both.
>>>
>>> I posted a thread on -net and, sadly, never got a single reply.
>>
>> Did you file a PR? Chances are bz (IPv6 maintainer) has just been very busy. :-)
>>
> 
> I was actually trying to get some feedback on -net and see if anyone had encountered the problem before filling a PR.
> 
> I guess I'll reproduce the problem, fill a PR, then post here so we can discuss it and make things move forward.

We (pfSense) patch things here and there, especially when it comes to
CARP, but we haven't seen any crashes with CARP+IPv6 on pfSense
2.1-DEVELOPMENT (now BETA0) since we moved to a base OS of FreeBSD
8.3-RELEASE. It was fairly trivial to crash/hang 8.1 with v6 in general
even without CARP.

There are several CARP+IPv6 clusters running pfSense 2.1 in the wild
handling production traffic like champs.[1]

You might have a look at this IPv6 status sheet we try to keep updated:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AojFUXcbH0ROdHlKV2F5SENULWk2NTVvQTBtQ2M0dEE

Our patches might also be of interest:
https://github.com/bsdperimeter/pfsense-tools/blob/master/builder_scripts/patches.RELENG_8_3
https://github.com/bsdperimeter/pfsense-tools/tree/master/patches/RELENG_8_3

Jim
[1] With a static setup, some work is still happening to make CARP RA
work for automatic configuration.