On Google Compute Engine (GCE) the latest VM boot images (at the time of writing) for Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 (eg ubuntu-1604-xenial-v20170811) ship with a file at /etc/sysctl.d/99-gce.conf which contains:

net.ipv4.ip_forward = 0

This kernel parameter determines whether packets can be forwarded between network interfaces. On its own, the presence of this line isn’t a big deal.

Separately, when you start the Docker daemon (at least in version 17.06.0-ce), it sets this kernel parameter to 1 (assuming you haven’t specified --ip-forward=false in the Docker configuration). Docker needs packet forwarding enabled so that Docker containers using the default bridge network can communicate outside the host.

If you later execute sysctl --system or similar after has Docker has started, for example to apply a new value for the nf_conntrack_max kernel parameter that you’ve specified in another file under /etc/sysctl.d/, then the ip_forward parameter will revert to 0 care of GCE’s default conf file.

At this point you’ll find your containers cannot reach the outside world, for example this will fail to resolve:

docker run ubuntu:16.04 getent hosts google.com

This will remain broken for all existing or new containers until you set the ip_forward parameter back to 1 manually or by restarting the Docker daemon.

If you’re using any Docker version since v1.8 (released about 2 years ago) you should see the following message when running a container with bridge networking if IP forwarding is disabled:

WARNING: IPv4 forwarding is disabled. Networking will not work.

Of course, that only helps if you’re using docker run interactively and does not help if the parameter gets changed after the containers are already running.

If you’re in this situation, add your own file to /etc/sysctl.d/ that follows 99-gce.conf alphabetically (eg 99-luftballon.conf) and ensure it contains:

net.ipv4.ip_forward = 0

You may also want to ensure the file has a trailing LF character to avoid any issues with processing it.

You can check the current value of the ip_forward kernel parameter with one of these two commands:

sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward
cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward