Re: SO_BINDTODEVICE inconsistency between IPv4 and IPv6

[Brian Haley <brian.haley@hp.com>]

On 03/17/2011 06:29 AM, David Woodhouse wrote:
> We've discovered strange behaviour when we listen on in6addr_any and use
> SO_BINDTODEVICE to bind to the lo device.
> 
> We can connect to any IPv4 address that is local to the machine, on any
> interface. (This is true whether we listen on AF_INET6/in6addr_any and
> accept IPv4 connections on the IPv6 socket, or whether we just listen on
> AF_INET/INADDR_ANY).
> 
> The IPv6 behaviour is different — the only IPv6 address that we can
> connect to is ::1.
> 
> See attached test case, which listens with SO_BINDTODEVICE as described.
> Note that it needs to be run as root because SO_BINDTODEVICE is a
> privileged operation.
> 
> Why this difference? Ideally, we want the Legacy IP behaviour to happen
> for IPv6 too; we want local clients to be able to connect to *any* local
> IP address to talk to our service, but we don't want to accept
> connections from the outside.
> 
<snip>

> telnet> close
> Connection closed.
> [root@macbook dwmw2]# telnet 2001:8b0:10b:1:216:eaff:fe05:bbb8 9999
> Trying 2001:8b0:10b:1:216:eaff:fe05:bbb8...
> telnet: connect to address 2001:8b0:10b:1:216:eaff:fe05:bbb8: Connection refused
> telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused

Hmm, "connection refused", do you have any iptables rules installed?  Connecting
to a local global address worked fine for me on 2.6.32-30 using a home-grown
test app.

BTW, the one difference you will see with this is that trying to connect to
a link-local won't work without specifying a scope (like an interface), so
that is different than IPv4.

-Brian