I am troubleshooting an issue in a docker setup with some Arista cEOS where I can’t ping inside a VRF. First I though it was a MTU issue as when you use MPLS, there is an extra tag in the L2 frame.
…But my pings weren’t that big.
Still wanted to increase the MTU because that’s the expected thing to do in your WAN links if you run MPLS and want your users in different VRFs to be able to use the full 1500 bytes.
After some searching, It seems you can change the default value using the config file as per this link:
$ ip link show docker0
9: docker0: mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state DOWN mode DEFAULT group default
link/ether 02:42:be:73:8c:d3 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
$ cat /etc/docker/daemon.json
{
"data-root": "/home/somebody/storage/docker",
"mtu": 1600
}
$ sudo service docker restart
..
$ ip link show docker0
9: docker0: mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state DOWN mode DEFAULT group default
link/ether 02:42:fb:c0:cf:a2 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
And restart docker. But still had mtu 1500. Checking another link it seems I actually need to create a container so the bridge come up with the new value
$ docker run -d busybox top ... 9: docker0: mtu 1600 qdisc noqueue state UP mode DEFAULT group default link/ether 02:42:fb:c0:cf:a2 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
Funny thing, once I started my lab again (using docker-topo) still got MTU 1500!!!
Will have to dig a bit why docker-topo doesnt take the docker mtu 1600 from the config file.
Solution: docker-topo is creating user-defined bridges, so it needs to be told that the mtu is different. The “mtu:1600” in the docker config it is only for the default bridge so when you start the busybox, it is attached to the default bridge and you see 1600.
The other thing I was curious was if I could tcpdump the networks created by docker.
Yes, you can!
# docker network ls # ifconfig # tcpdump -i br-xxxx