values in sysctl.conf not loaded on boot.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server SLES Virtualization
1

I have two installations of SLES11 SP2 on X86-64 that I use to host KVM VMs. They are configured for bridging networking and it all works after I use sysctl to set
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables = 0
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables = 0
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-arptables = 0

I have added these three lines to the end of /etc/sysctl.conf, expecting that the system will set them on boot. This does not happen. /etc/sysctl.conf is being loaded at boot as I can see other values from that file change when I change them. Because of this I can not load VMs at boot with any reliability. If I change these settings and then load the VMs everything works fine. Why is SLES not setting these values?

Thanks in advance.

2

I hit this type of thing earlier this week with other values and I believe
the explanation is here in the Notes section:

http://linux.die.net/man/8/sysctl

Basically some module loaded after the sysctl stuff is initially applied
(pretty early on apparently) is re-setting those values. How do you get
past this? Put the commands you want, the actual sysctl commands, in
/etc/init.d/after.local so that they are called after all of the other
stuff loads:

Good luck.

3

I found the answer and thought I would report it here as others are probably seeing similar problems. The /proc entries needed to implement the sysctl settings I need are created when the bridge module is installed. That module is installed when br0 is created, much later than boot.sysctl is run so those commands fail. I am seeing that there are many similar things associated with SLES boot system. They will show up as a “/proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/autoconf: No such file or directory” message where the exact file depends on which module is needed. When I added bridge to INITRD_MODULES= in /etc/sysconfig/kernel and rebuilt the initrd with mkinitrd, the modules was loaded earlier and things worked.