HP switch and IPv6
Recently i have been configuring new HP switch (2910-al series) and I decided to try IPv6 support. My expectations were like It's the same as IPv4 except addresses are different (=longer). For comparison, IPv4 configuration looks like this:
Switch# conf t Switch(config)# vlan 1 Switch(vlan-1)# ip address 1.2.3.4/24So after this assumption i have tried following:
Switch# conf t Switch(config)# vlan 1 Switch(vlan-1)# ipv6 enable Switch(vlan-1)# ipv6 address 2001:111:222:333::1/64 Error: Configure loopback address before configuring ipv6 address on the system.To be sure that I'm not running very old firmware i upgraded to newest one from the web (preinstalled one was from year 2009, the newest one from web was from August 2010 - still not quite new enough for me). Again the same error, so lets contact support (HP gives lifetime support for ProCurve switches, which is nice and my problem is bug or my inability to read (316 pages long IPv6 configuration manual) ). After contacting support shortly I got reply with output from some newer non-public firmware, which makes things around this error clearer.
Error: Configure an IPv4 loopback address before configuring IPv6 address on the system.This looked promising, however there was a catch. Loopback already had an IPv4 address 127.0.0.1 by default (why do I need another one) but refuses to assign another 127.x.x.x address. OK, so i assigned it some other unusable address like 1.1.1.1/32. After this assignment switch stopped complaining and let me to assign it an IPv6 address.
So to conserve valuable IPv4 addresses I have waste another one to enable possibility to configure IPv6? (forgot to mention, it also complained when I tried to use the same IPv4 as some VLAN already has) So for configuring IPv6 on this switch it takes one unusable IPv4 address. This is not good for IPv6 transition.
Further testing of IPv6 revealed another problem - default IPv6 route configuration.
Because switch is thing that i want to be able to access even if the rest of
the network fails I prefer to setup as many thing to manually/statically. But HP decided that there is no way how setup static IPv6 route
(or I still didn't found it in manual, but I'm 99% there is no such thing
there). Default route for IPv6 is advertised by network and switch only
listens to RA (router-advertisement) packet that will tell it which router to
use. Up to now still fine unless i loaded our old configuration and enriched
it with IPv6 configuration. It turned out that there is something wrong -
switch ignores RA and doesn't set the default (or any other) route
advertised by network. After week of having not time figure this out I
probably founded the problem. The magic command that makes this to happen is
management-vlan
which should harder the security of switch by
declaring one VLAN for management and effectively isolate it from other VLANs.
Disabling this option makes the switch work as expected (switch accepts RA)
but this option is something that I want to use.
Update: And the solution is new firmware. However the version needed is not publicly available (i got link from HP support). Firmware version that I reported the problem is W_14_49 (available from HP web) and version from support is W_14_68 (probably available on request from HP support). After all IPv6 is now working even with "security hardened" configuration.