I am watching the status page of my OpenWRT router and see that the IPv6 address assigned to the FreedomBox is being renewed every two minutes! Meanwhile, the IPv4 address is not renewing nearly as often.
From what I can see, Network Manager handles the IPv4 but what handles IPv6 DHCP?
What’s actually handling DHCP for v6 on your network? Your router?
Yes, an OpenWRT router. By watching its status page I see that the FreedomBox is renewing its IPv6 lease every two minutes. I have other Debian boxes on the same network with IPv6 and they don’t renew for several hours (my router is set to 12 hours of lease time on DHCP offers).
I might be misremembering but lease time is set by the DHCP server, not the device receiving an address. So I’d check WRT first and see what the lease time is set therein.
My understanding is that the DHCP server sets what is essentially the maximum lease time but the client is free to renew at any interval less than that and most do that I have seen.
Maybe try setting the ip static on the router and see what happens then?
I’ve just given up on IPv6 on my LAN. No need for the added complexity and lack of control over it. I had another device that was using Network Manager that was doing the same thing and even though OpenWrt was showing an IPv6 address that was being renewed, that device didn’t even have that address in the ip a listing! Life is just too short for that sort of nonsense.
For another reason I revisited IPv6 last week and FBX was still doing the same thing. After poking around a bit I could see there was DHCPv6 traffic going out but the incoming response from the router was apparently not seen. The light bulb finally went on and I checked the firewall. Sure enough, the firewalld zone had been set to a restrictive zone that did not allow dhcpv6-client to pass. Once I set a zone appropriate for my LAN, all is well.
I’m still not a huge fan of IPv6 but that’s another story.