910773 - IPv6 retry socket connection on protocol error

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Networking, defect, P3)

Description

[Jiří Boháč]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:22.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 2013062200

Steps to reproduce:

On Linux, when an IPv6 connection attempt results in an ICMPv6 destination unreachable packet with an unknown code, connect() returns -EPROTO.
If this happens a blank page is displayed, instead of trying other addresses (and e.g. falling back to IPv4).

Unfortunately, Linux does not recognize error codes 5 and 6 defined in RFC4443:
                  5 - Source address failed ingress/egress policy
                  6 - Reject route to destination
So -EPROTO is returned even for those.

nss_MD_unix_map_default_error() maps -EPROTO to PR_IO_ERROR;
ErrorAccordingToNSPR() then maps PR_IO_ERROR to NS_ERROR_FAILURE. I think it should be mapped to NS_ERROR_CONNECTION_REFUSED();

Try this by connecting to http://[2620:113:80c0:8000:10:121:0:100]/



Actual results:

Blank page is displayed.


Expected results:

Fall back to other addresses.

Comment 1

[Jiří Boháč]

I have proposed a patch to fix the linux kernel to recognize codes 5 and 6:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.network/281863

I still think Firefox should treat most errors returned from connect() in a way that causes fallback to other addresses. Other programs do (e.g. ssh) and do not have problems with the host above, despite the confusing -EPROTO returned by the kernel.

If for no other reason, Firefox users of all past and current linux kernels will suffer from this bug, until their kernel is updated.

Comment 2

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Bulk change to priority: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1399258

Comment 3

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Bulk change to priority: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1399258