[Bug 50093] Re: Some sysctl's are ignored on boot

[david wood]

All documentation on the net referring to changing certain settings in
/etc/sysctl.conf such as net.ipv4.netfilter.ip_conntrack_max is wrong
for Ubuntu. In addition, workarounds suggesting that ordering of module
load vs. sysctl.conf execution can be helped by i.e. putting
ip_conntrack into /etc/modules also do not work.

I'm sure on some level this is Low priority - aka bury for 5 years and
never look at it again - and I can appreciate that this is not a simple
problem to properly solve. But left as is, this is just another mine
laid in the field for sysadmins foolish enough to use Ubuntu Server. I
respectfully suggest that it might be useful to make multiple attempts
to run sysctl -p at various milestones during the boot process.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/50093

Title:
  Some sysctl's are ignored on boot

Status in “procps” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: procps

  /etc/init.d/procps.sh comes too early in the boot process to apply a
  lot of sysctl's. As it runs before networking modules are loaded and
  filesystems are mounted, there are quite a lot of commonly-used
  sysctl's which are simply ignored on boot and produce errors to the
  console.

  Simply renaming the symlink from S17 to > S40 probably isn't a great
  solution, as there are probably folk who want and expect some sysctl's
  to be applied before filesystems are mounted and so on. However,
  simply ugnoring something as important as sysctl settings isn't really
  on. Administrators expect the settings in /etc/sysctl.conf to take
  effect.

  One sto-gap solution would be to run sysctl -p twice; once at S17 and once at S41. There may still be some warnings and errors, but everything would be applied. A different, more complex approach might be to re-architect the sysctl configuration into something like;
   
      /etc/sysctl.d/$modulename

  and have the userland module-loading binaries take care of applying
  them after modules are loaded. Though this may take care of explicitly
  loaded modules only, I'm not sure.

  Incidentally, /etc/sysctl.conf still refers to
  /etc/networking/options, but hasn't that been deprecated?

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