BGP.guru

BGP.guru

Nerd blog.

23 Oct 2014

Troubleshooting ICMPv6 with tcpdump

I’ve previously written about my OpenBSD PF firewall in front of my VM server at my colo. I had a firewall rule which used the following variable: icmp6_types="{ 2, 128 }". This wasn’t working properly on the LAN side, and I had to disable the ICMPv6 restrictions to get things back to working. I wanted to fix this permanently, the right way, by determining what needed to be allowed and what could be denied without breaking things.

Tcpdump To The Rescue

I started to tcpdump on the internal interface, to establish exactly which ICMPv6 types were needed for regular operation. I was using tcpdump -i vlanXX ip6, which was WAY too verbose. I eventually found this really helpful blog post (now dead) web.archive.org link of the blog which suggested using the following to troubleshoot NDP issues.

tcpdump -i eth0 'ip6 && icmp6 && (ip6[40] == 133 || ip6[40] == 134 || ip6[40] == 135 || ip6[40] == 136)'

Looking at the table of Types of ICMPv6 Messages on Wikipedia, these numbers correspond to the following strings:

ICMPv6 ValueMeaning / Error Message
133Router Solicitation (NDP)
134Router Advertisement (NDP)
135Neighbour Solicitation (NDP)
136Neighbour Advertisement (NDP)
137Redirect Message (NDP)

Theodore Baschak - Theo is a network engineer with experience operating core internet technologies like HTTP, HTTPS and DNS. He has extensive experience running service provider networks with OSPF, MPLS, and BGP.