[Bug 1017166] Re: Unplugged or deactivated ethernet interfaces may not be handled properly

[Stéphane Graber]

I vaguely remember discussing that on IRC already, but there it's again
anyway ;)

I don't agree that we should start dhclient in the background on failure
to get an IP, that sounds wrong and will prevent any of the ifupdown
scripts from running properly, not to mention confuse ifupdown regarding
the state of the interface.

What I did fix last cycle with a change to isc-dhcp is the case where
you boot with a working dhcp config and then your dhcp server dies for a
few days. In the past, dhclient would exit and you'd never get an IP
again, now that's fixed and dhclient will never exit once it
successfully gets a first lease.

In your weird setup, I see two obvious options:
 - Go with static addressing
 - Go with a manual interface entry calling "dhclient $INTERFACE" as post-up

I'm going to mark it as won't fix based on that, if you don't agree,
feel free to revert or poke me on IRC :)

** Changed in: ifupdown (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => Won't Fix

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1017166

Title:
  Unplugged or deactivated ethernet interfaces may not be handled
  properly

Status in “ifupdown” package in Ubuntu:
  Won't Fix

Bug description:
  If i have a server which has a management-only interface which is
  usually down, in versions of Ubuntu before 11.10, I could configure
  that ethernet interface in /etc/network/interfaces, and dhclient would
  try forever to get an address.

  I believe this is a regression that was introduced in the fix for bug
  #838968 , where the '-1' parameter was introduced to dhclient3's
  invocation in ifupdown.

  While I do think we should report errors, we should also retry this
  *forever* since it may be the only way a system can be reached *to see
  that error*.

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