Stopping ip_conntrack_max from resetting

Stopping ip_conntrack_max from resetting

[Richard Andrews]

Hello,

We have a system running iptables, of which due to the incoming traffic we've had to increase ip_conntrack_max via sysctl.  However, when restarting the service during any maintenance the value we pass during sysctl.conf is reset to the default 65536.  Which then we are forced to run "sysctl -p" to reload our custom value.  Is there a way to stop the iptables service from rewriting ip_conntrack_max when issued a restart/reload?

Richard Andrews

Re: Stopping ip_conntrack_max from resetting

[Jan Engelhardt]

On Monday 2008-03-24 15:09, Richard Andrews wrote:
> Hello,
>
> We have a system running iptables, of which due to the incoming
> traffic we've had to increase ip_conntrack_max via sysctl. 
> However, when restarting the service during any maintenance the
> value we pass during sysctl.conf is reset to the default 65536. 
> Which then we are forced to run "sysctl -p" to reload our custom
> value.  Is there a way to stop the iptables service from rewriting
> ip_conntrack_max when issued a restart/reload?

That seems to be a bug of your distribution, because on mine,
sysctl.conf is read and applied on boot.

Re: Stopping ip_conntrack_max from resetting

[Franck JONCOURT]

On Tue, 25 Mar 2008 02:59:12 +0100 (CET), Jan Engelhardt

<jengelh@computergmbh.de> wrote:

> 

> On Monday 2008-03-24 15:09, Richard Andrews wrote:

>> Hello,



Hi,



>> We have a system running iptables, of which due to the incoming

>> traffic we've had to increase ip_conntrack_max via sysctl.

>> However, when restarting the service during any maintenance the

>> value we pass during sysctl.conf is reset to the default 65536.

>> Which then we are forced to run "sysctl -p" to reload our custom

>> value.  Is there a way to stop the iptables service from rewriting

>> ip_conntrack_max when issued a restart/reload?

> 

> That seems to be a bug of your distribution, because on mine,

> sysctl.conf is read and applied on boot.



Running Debian Sid, I can get the same behaviour. This is not

a bug, just a matter of boot sequence.



If you load sysctl configuration before your module is loaded

(should be nf_conntrack_ipv4, not quite sure), the entry 

net.ipv4.netfilter.ip_conntrack_max does not exist yet, so it

is not possible to set it to its value.



To get it work, I just added it to my module list, in order to 

load it at boot time before my sysctl configuration.



---

Franck Joncourt

http://www.debian.org/ - http://smhteam.info/wiki/