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Missing IPV6 address for local network interfaces causes service timeout

Year ago I installed Weblogic server + Oralce database server for a customer. Few months later my colleagues asked me whether something has changed in the environment or if something happened at the data center, because they started to see Java exceptions for unknown hostname for a web service they were calling and this was happening only from time to time. We've checked the firewall rules, DNS and all the stuff, but everything seemed to be working fine. The only solution by that time they came out was to add the hostname to the hosts file of the Weblogic server. These were versions of the software:
Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.2 (64bit)
Weblogic Server 10.3.5
JDK 1.6.0_31

Then six months later, problem showed up again. The new version of the application was calling another web service, which obviously was missing from the hosts file and this time I decided to investigate the problem and find out what's really happening. After I received the email I immediately logged in to the server and fired several nslookups and ping requests to the host that was causing problems, both were successful and returned correct result. I've double checked hosts file, nsswitch.conf file and all the network settings, everything was correct. Meanwhile the Weblogic server log kept getting java.net.UnknownHostException for the very same host.

Obviously the problem required different approach. I've found useful Java procedure to call the function getByName and in some way simulate the application behavior, webservice hostname was intentionally changed, this is the procedure:

[root@srv tmp]# cd /tmp/
cat > DomainResolutionTest.java
java.net.InetAddress;
import java.net.UnknownHostException;
import java.io.PrintWriter;
import java.io.StringWriter;

public class DomainResolutionTest {

public static void main(String[] args) {
if (args.length == 0) args = new String[] { "sve.to" };

try {
InetAddress ip = InetAddress.getByName(args[0]);
System.out.println(ip.toString());
}catch (UnknownHostException uhx) {
System.out.println("ERROR: " + uhx.getMessage() + "\n" + getStackTrace(uhx));
Throwable cause = uhx.getCause();
if (cause != null) System.out.println("CAUSE: " + cause.getMessage());
}

}

public static String getStackTrace(Throwable t)
{
StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter(sw, true);
t.printStackTrace(pw);
pw.flush();
sw.flush();
return sw.toString();
}

}

Then just compile the procedure and execute it:

[root@srv tmp]# javac DomainResolutionTest.java
[root@srv tmp]# java DomainResolutionTest
sve.to/95.154.250.125
[root@srv tmp]# java DomainResolutionTest
sve.to/95.154.250.125

Running the procedure several times returned the correct address and no error occurred, but looping the procedure for some time returned the exception I was looking for:

while 1>0; do java DomainResolutionTest; done > 1
^C
[root@srv tmp]# wc -l 2
2648 2
[root@srv tmp]# grep Unknown 2
java.net.UnknownHostException: sve.to
[root@srv tmp]# less 2
......
sve.to/95.154.250.125
ERROR: sve.to
java.net.UnknownHostException: sve.to
at java.net.Inet6AddressImpl.lookupAllHostAddr(Native Method)
at java.net.InetAddress$1.lookupAllHostAddr(InetAddress.java:849)
at java.net.InetAddress.getAddressFromNameService(InetAddress.java:1202)
at java.net.InetAddress.getAllByName0(InetAddress.java:1153)
at java.net.InetAddress.getAllByName(InetAddress.java:1083)
at java.net.InetAddress.getAllByName(InetAddress.java:1019)
at java.net.InetAddress.getByName(InetAddress.java:969)
at DomainResolutionTest.main(DomainResolutionTest.java:12)

sve.to/95.154.250.125
....

From what I understand is that Java process is trying to lookup the IP address of the requested host, but first it takes all IP address of the local interfaces (eth0 and lo) including their default IPV6 address and then try to resolve these IP addresses to hostnames. Although I didn't configured IPV6 addresses for the interfaces, they already had default ones. This is because the OS had IPV6 enabled by default and respectively the interfaces got default IPV6 addresses. During the installation I removed localhost6 (::1) record from hosts file, which later caused this error and also missing record for eth0 IP address.

The problem may be that the JVM performs both IPv6 and IPv4 queries and if the DNS server is not configured to handle IPv6 queries, the application might issue an unknown host exception. If the DNS is not configured to handle IPv6 queries properly, the application must wait for the IPv6 query to time out. The workaround for this is to make Java use only IPV4 stack and run Java process with -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true parameter. This will make Java process to prefer running in IPV4, thus avoiding the error for IPV6 look up. Unfortunately running the above Java procedure with this parameter again returned UnknownHostException.

It looks like genuine bug with IPv6 in Java, I also saw few bugs opened at Sun regarding this Java behavior, but there was no solution. Finally after adding hostname for local interface's IPV6 addresses in host file, the exceptions disappeared:

::1                                          localhost6
fe80::20c:29ff:fe36:4144                     srv6

So for the future installations I'll be explicitly disabling IPV6 on the installed systems. The easiest way to do that is like this:

cat >> /etc/sysctl.conf
#disable all ipv6 capabilities on a kernel level
sysctl net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1

Regards,
Sve