Today I fired up a Debian 12 droplet and enabled IPv6. The instructions for setting up IPv6 on Debian must not have been updated for 12 yet (adding an IPv6 block in /etc/network/interfaces does not work) so I used the instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 which uses netplan. This appears to work and persists on reboot.
However, I noticed this comment in the /etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.yaml file:
# This file is generated from information provided by the datasource. Changes
# to it will not persist across an instance reboot. To disable cloud-init's
# network configuration capabilities, write a file
# /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/99-disable-network-config.cfg with the following:
# network: {config: disabled}
Changes do persist across reboots like I said so I’m not sure what this message is referring to.
I also commented out /etc/network/interfaces and rebooted. Doesn’t look like this file is even used any more on Debian 12.
Not much of a question here, mostly just notes for anyone else setting up Debian 12 droplets with IPv6.
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Thank you for your feedback!
The message you found in the
/etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.yamlfile indicates that changes made directly to this file may not persist after a reboot, because it’s overwritten by the cloud-init process at startup. However, configurations done the right way via netplan, which eventually writes to this file, should persist over reboots.If users want to disable the cloud-init’s network configuration capabilities, they need to create a file at
/etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/99-disable-network-config.cfgand add network: {config: disabled} inside it.As for
/etc/network/interfaces, it is indeed not used anymore on the latest versions of Debian, which now utilize the netplan tool for configuring networking.Heya @bren0817,
Thank you for the provided information and observations, I’ll be sure to pass this to DigitalOcean’s internal channels so that it can be addressed for future use.
Thanks again for that!