[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#619346: network-manager: No option to respect RAs if IPv6 forwarding is enabled

[John Pearson]

Package: network-manager
Version: 0.8.1-6
Severity: important
Tags: ipv6


By default, network-manager allows IPv6 interfaces to use stateless
autoconfiguration based on router advertisements or, failing that,
DHCPv6; in this case, it sets /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/<if>/accept_ra
to 1.  This is exposed in the "IPv6 Settings" tab of the Gnome network
manager applet as "Automatic" method.

However if IPv6 foprwarding is enabled on the interface, the kernel
ignores RAs even if accept_ra is set to 1.  This is a sensible default,
but not always appropriate; and the kernel provides for it to be
overridden by setting /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/<if>/accept_ra to 2 - then
RAs are acted upon even if IPv6 forwarding is enabled.

Network-manager's curent behaviour prevents me from taking advantage opf
this behaviour, which (for at least some interfaces) is what I actually
need. It should either leave the accept_ra setting alone when the
"Automatic" method is selected, so that the user can specify the
behaviour they want in (e.g.) /etc/sysctl.conf, or provide an additional
option to allow stateless autoconfiguration via RAs even when IPv6
forwarding is enabled.

Regards,


John Pearson

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.37.2-0briar (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages network-manager depends on:
ii  adduser                 3.112+nmu2       add and remove users and groups
ii  dbus                    1.2.24-4         simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  isc-dhcp-client         4.1.1-P1-15      ISC DHCP client
ii  libc6                   2.11.2-10        Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libdbus-1-3             1.2.24-4         simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2        0.88-2.1         simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libgcrypt11             1.4.5-2          LGPL Crypto library - runtime libr
ii  libglib2.0-0            2.24.2-1         The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgnutls26             2.8.6-1          the GNU TLS library - runtime libr
ii  libgudev-1.0-0          164-3            GObject-based wrapper library for 
ii  libnl1                  1.1-6            library for dealing with netlink s
ii  libnm-glib2             0.8.1-6          network management framework (GLib
ii  libnm-util1             0.8.1-6          network management framework (shar
ii  libpolkit-gobject-1-0   0.96-4           PolicyKit Authorization API
ii  libuuid1                2.17.2-9         Universally Unique ID library
ii  lsb-base                3.2-23.2squeeze1 Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip
ii  udev                    164-3            /dev/ and hotplug management daemo
ii  wpasupplicant           0.6.10-2.1       client support for WPA and WPA2 (I

Versions of packages network-manager recommends:
ii  dnsmas 2.55-2                            A small caching DNS proxy and DHCP
ii  iptabl 1.4.8-3                           administration tools for packet fi
ii  modemm 0.4+git.20100624t180933.6e79d15-2 D-Bus service for managing modems
ii  policy 0.96-4                            framework for managing administrat
ii  ppp    2.4.5-4                           Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) - da

Versions of packages network-manager suggests:
pn  avahi-autoipd                 <none>     (no description available)

-- Configuration Files:
/etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf changed [not included]

-- no debconf information