Seeing spikes in IPv6 traffic every 2 hours

Disclaimer: I'm new to Linode and Linux, but am trying to run a Minecraft server for my son. I've managed to get one up and running thanks to a great StackScript I found by 'jsmith'.

I've begun adding some other functionality like MySQL and Apache 2 to the linode, but have now started seeing spikes in IPv6 traffic that occurs every two hours. I've place an image here:

~~[https://skitch.com/jclarkv/8y4f4/linode-dashboard-redmaven" target="_blank">](https://skitch.com/jclarkv/8y4f4/linode … d-redmaven">https://skitch.com/jclarkv/8y4f4/linode-dashboard-redmaven](

Is this anything I need to try to fix or stop?

Thanks in advance for any insight. I did try to search the forums but came up empty.

jclarkv

3 Replies

That is IPv6 local LAN chatter and is not counted against your monthly transfer. You can ignore it.

-Chris

Not sure what might have changed recently, but personally I'd just ignore that. Notice the scale - you're talking less than 100 bits/s, so it just looks like a "spike" since the overall scale of the graph is so low. If you generated even one or two regular IPv6 connections, I suspect that entire graph would turn into a flat line near 0 :-)

If you've recently enabled IPv6 on that host you might just be seeing the result of occasional router announcements or some such. If you wanted you could trace the traffic (e.g., leave a tcpdump running on your internal interface) to deduce the exact packet, but if it were me I probably wouldn't bother for any operational reason - just if I were purely satisfying my curiosity.

(For what it's worth the Priv In on one of my nodes pretty much has the same pattern)

– David

Great answers. Thank you both.

jcv

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