I’ve been having this issue for a few weeks, where my IPv6 address kept changing on my laptop. It doesn’t affect me on other devices because they don’t have long-lived connections to things like SSH.
Turns out it’s a bug in pfSense which turned up in a recent update of radvd, where it’s not RFC8106 compilant due to mis-handling RA lifetimes.
There’s supposedly a fix coming in a future version (see here), but for now I need a working network!
Update!
@fabrizior responded in the netgate forum to inform me that the System_Patches package was probably a better way of doing this…
- Make a backup of /etc/inc/services.inc
- Review the diff for the actual source commit and copy the URL for the “unified diff” link at the bottom of the page
- Install the System_Patches package
- Add a Patch (System > Patches; Add New Patch)
- Description: RADVD set AdvRDNSSLifetime. Fixes #11105
- URL/Commit ID: https://redmine.pfsense.org/projects/pfsense/repository/revisions/54b3109f0b1978e22866117b6d93715eb8d78c29/diff?format=diff
- Click Save
- Click “Fetch” for the newly added patch entry and wait for it to update.
- Click “Test” and review output
- Click “Apply”
- Restart the RADVD service
- Verify with a grep for “AdvRDNSSLifetime” in /var/etc/radvd.conf - one entry per interface
I tested this and it seemed to do the thing that’s needed, so I reverted my patch and did that. 🧐
The previous fix…
Edit /etc/services.inc, it’s a PHP file that has the functions for handling service restarts.
Go to line 291 (type :set number to turn on line numbering) and add this new line: $radvdconf .= "AdvRDNSSLifetime 3060\n";. You can search for or search for ‘DHCP-PD’` too.
It should look like this if you’ve got line numbers on:
290 }
291 $radvdconf .= "AdvRDNSSLifetime 360\n";
292 $radvdconf .= "};\n";
293 }
294
295 /* handle DHCP-PD prefixes and 6RD dynamic interfaces */
And again lower down, search for write radvd:
386 }
387 $radvdconf .= "AdvRDNSSLifetime 360\n";
388 $radvdconf .= "};\n";
389 }
390
391 /* write radvd.conf */
To restart the service, go into the web interface and do it that way.
Hopefully this’ll fix it!