Package: iputils-ping Version: 3:20210202-1 Severity: critical Tags: fixed-upstream ipv6 bullseye Owner: no...@debian.org
O/S: Debian bullseye 11.2 Kernel: Linux binkg-vpn01 5.10.0-11-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.10.92-1 (2022-01-18) x86_64 GNU/Linux When I invoke ping, it throws an inappropriate error message. The message is "ping: socket: Address family not supported by protocol". Please consider the following excerpt from a terminal session: root@binkg-vpn01 /etc/ssh # ping www.google.de ping: socket: Address family not supported by protocol PING www.google.de (142.251.37.3) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from muc11s23-in-f3.1e100.net (142.251.37.3): icmp_seq=1 ttl=118 time=7.30 ms ... The error message occurs because I have disabled IPv6 *via kernel command line*; that is, my *kernel command line* includes the option "ipv6.disable=1". In this situation, ping obviously insists on obtaining an IPv6 socket although IPv6 is disabled. IMPORTANT NOTE: According to other reports of the same problem, ping behaves correctly when IPv6 is *not* disabled at the kernel command line, but *is* instead disabled via sysctl (e.g. sysctl -w net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1). The problem occurs only when IPv6 is disabled at the kernel command line. Please note also that disabling it via sysctl *in addition* to disabling it at the kernel command line does not solve the problem. Actually, it does not change anything, because the respective sysctl option does not have any effect if IPv6 is already disabled at the kernel command line. ping's misbehavior in this situation is not acceptable. Many people have IPv6 disabled at the kernel command line, and ping's misbehavior breaks a lot of Nagios scripts for them, which is why I have assigned the "critical" severity level. Please fix this as soon as possible. This bug is well-known and has been fixed upstream 4 (yes: four!) months ago. Please refer to the following discussion: https://github.com/iputils/iputils/issues/293 Thank you very much, and best regards, Binarus
