Comment 36 for bug 44194

Hi Reinhard,

On Mon, Dec 01, 2008 at 10:49:52PM +0100, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> Reporters claim this bug to be fixed. What symptoms did recently arise?
>

On the wpa_supplicant front, none. However it raises issue with iscsi
devices as outlined below.

> > It seems that the issue is with the ifupdown script from
> > wpa_supplicant.
>
> What is the issue?

I don't know. That's why I suggested to run the ifupdown script in
debugging mode in order to gather more information about the failure. I
don't have access to an environment to do such testing, thus the
suggestion I made in this bug.

> > If the script cannot be run early in the boot process it should fail
> > gracefully and leave the interface unconfigured until the networking
> > init script is run.
>
> That might be or might not be feasible, depending on the reason why it
> fails. The change I've introduced delays the configuration of networking
> until the netbase init script is run. I fail to see what the problem is
> with that approach.

Waiting until S40networking is run brings up an issue with iscsi
devices. The current way of handling iscsi devices is to treat them as
local devices by making sure that all iscsi devices are created before
local filesystems are mounted (S35mountall.sh and S30checkfs.sh). That
requires ifupdown scripts to be run as soon as network interfaces are
discovered instead of S40networking.

> > I've also reverted the udev rules change to wait for the networking init
> > script to have run. It breaks the boot process as we're trying to
> > configure network interfaces as soon as they're discovered.
>
> Instead of unilaterarily reverting the change I committed ages ago, it
> would have been more appropriate to first discuss the symptoms in a bug
> instead of just removing a fix that has been sufficiently tested. I
> consider your revert as a violation of the CoC, points 2 and 4.
>
> The more correct fix IMO would be to to change the udev rule to flag the
> interfaces that need "delayed" starting via the init script and
> "late-start" them in /etc/init.d/networking.
>

soren and Keybuk discussed this issue [1] (16:40 - 16:49). Their
proposal is to fix the ifupdown scripts so they work early in the
process. In the case of open-iscsi, the iscsi utilities had to be moved
from /usr/{bin/sbin} to /bin,/sbin.

If this is not possible ifupdown scripts should exit gracefully so that
the network interface is left unconfigured and will be configured later
by S40networking.

[1]: http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2008/11/20/%23ubuntu-devel.txt

> Still you haven't explained what exatly fails. Is it hot-plugging
> cardbus cards? Or is it starting networking for NICs connected via PCI?
>
> Please elaborate on this issue.
>

I've discussed this issue with dustin and soren on irc [2] (16:16):

[2] http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2008/11/20/%23ubuntu-server.txt

soren's point is that delaying network interface configuration to
S40networking is too late in the boot process and against what Ubuntu
has been trying to achieve with the boot process.

Although the udev rule changes fixes the issue encounter with
wpa_supplicant it breaks the iscsi use case (and other network devices
such as nbd). I've thus reopened this bug to track its status in jaunty.
If you think a new bug should be filed let me know.

--
Mathias Gug
Ubuntu Developer http://www.ubuntu.com