How to dynamically enable and disable ipv6 on an interface

Question

How to dynamically enable and disable ipv6 on an interface so that it gets link local address when enabled. I tried sysctl net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1 and sysctl net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=0, but is there any other way?

Answer 1

I think your approach is valid as it is. You could use the per-interface settings if you don't want to change settings for every interface, e.g. net.ipv6.conf.eth0.disable_ipv6

I wouldn't recommend touching anything else.

Answer 2

To turn off IPv6 in Ubuntu 11.04

Firstly, On or off, check it out

$ ifconfig -a

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 
          inet addr:  Bcast:  Mask:
          **inet6** addr: fe80::210:f3ff:fe21:722a/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:982 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:943 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:800461 (800.4 KB)  TX bytes:144524 (144.5 KB)
          Interrupt:20 Memory:f7d00000-f7d20000 

eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr  
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
          Interrupt:16 Memory:f7c00000-f7c20000 

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          **inet6** addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:20 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:20 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:1200 (1.2 KB)  TX bytes:1200 (1.2 KB)

Secondly, Turn off, i modified the line as following and patched the grub

$ grep ipv6 /etc/default/grub

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="ipv6.disable=1 quiet splash"

$ update-grub
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.38-11-generic-pae
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.38-11-generic-pae
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
done