How to disable IPv6 on CentOS / RHEL 7

Sometimes I miss the good old days …

Recently, I had an issue with one of the servers, where a bunch of services were attaching to IPv6 ports instead of the IPv4 ones. Rather than editing the configuration of each of these services, I wanted to simply disabled IPv6 on the machine.

In the old good days, things like these were easily done via the sysctl. I surely tried that option too, but it wasn’t enough. Turns out, the proper way these days is to do this via Grub, as per this blog post:

  1. Vim /etc/default/grub file
  2. Change: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”ipv6.disable=1 crashkernel=auto rhgb quiet”
  3. Regenerate and overwrite Grub config with: grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
  4. Reboot.

That sounds a bit too excessive. But then again a reboot is also required for the proper disabling of SELinux, so I guess its’ fine.

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