Routing of 127/8 is tradtionally forbidden, we consider
packets from that address block martian when routing and do
not process corresponding ARP requests.
This is a sane default but renders a huge address space
practically unuseable.
The RFC states that no address within the 127/8 block should
ever appear on any network anywhere but it does not forbid
the use of such addresses outside of the loopback device in
particular. For example to address a pool of virtual guests
behind a load balancer.
This patch adds a new interface option 'route_localnet'
enabling routing of the 127/8 address block and processing
of ARP requests on a specific interface.
Note that for the feature to work, the default local route
covering 127/8 dev lo needs to be removed.
Example:
$ sysctl -w net.ipv4.conf.eth0.route_localnet=1
$ ip route del 127.0.0.0/8 dev lo table local
$ ip addr add 127.1.0.1/16 dev eth0
$ ip route flush cache
V2: Fix invalid check to auto flush cache (thanks davem)
Signed-off-by: Thomas Graf <tgraf@suug.ch>
Acked-by: Neil Horman <nhorman@tuxdriver.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
d0daebc3d6