When constructing ICMP response messages, the kernel will try to pick a
suitable source address for the outgoing packet. However, if no IPv4
addresses are configured on the system at all, this will fail and we end up
producing an ICMP message with a source address of 0.0.0.0. This can happen
on a box routing IPv4 traffic via v6 nexthops, for instance.
Since 0.0.0.0 is not generally routable on the internet, there's a good
chance that such ICMP messages will never make it back to the sender of the
original packet that the ICMP message was sent in response to. This, in
turn, can create connectivity and PMTUd problems for senders. Fortunately,
RFC7600 reserves a dummy address to be used as a source for ICMP
messages (192.0.0.8/32), so let's teach the kernel to substitute that
address as a last resort if the regular source address selection procedure
fails.
Below is a quick example reproducing this issue with network namespaces:
ip netns add ns0
ip l add type veth peer netns ns0
ip l set dev veth0 up
ip a add 10.0.0.1/24 dev veth0
ip a add fc00:dead:cafe:42::1/64 dev veth0
ip r add 10.1.0.0/24 via inet6 fc00:dead:cafe:42::2
ip -n ns0 l set dev veth0 up
ip -n ns0 a add fc00:dead:cafe:42::2/64 dev veth0
ip -n ns0 r add 10.0.0.0/24 via inet6 fc00:dead:cafe:42::1
ip netns exec ns0 sysctl -w net.ipv4.icmp_ratelimit=0
ip netns exec ns0 sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
tcpdump -tpni veth0 -c 2 icmp &
ping -w 1 10.1.0.1 > /dev/null
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v[v]... for full protocol decode
listening on veth0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), snapshot length 262144 bytes
IP 10.0.0.1 > 10.1.0.1: ICMP echo request, id 29, seq 1, length 64
IP 0.0.0.0 > 10.0.0.1: ICMP net 10.1.0.1 unreachable, length 92
2 packets captured
2 packets received by filter
0 packets dropped by kernel
With this patch the above capture changes to:
IP 10.0.0.1 > 10.1.0.1: ICMP echo request, id 31127, seq 1, length 64
IP 192.0.0.8 > 10.0.0.1: ICMP net 10.1.0.1 unreachable, length 92
Fixes: 1da177e4c3 ("Linux-2.6.12-rc2")
Reported-by: Juliusz Chroboczek <jch@irif.fr>
Reviewed-by: David Ahern <dsahern@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
3218274773