Our Networking Story

[Benjamin Kerensa]

Why was it  necessary to have discussions internally when they could
have been open by default?

On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 11:48 AM, Bryan Quigley
<bryan.quigley at canonical.com> wrote:
> We've had a lot of internal Canonical discussions about our networking story
> and before going to a UDS session [1] it was suggested to post to
> ubuntu-devel.
>
> *Network Restart*
> I'd like to start by asking each of you what you think is the correct way to
> restart networking on Ubuntu server?  Feel free to write it down and include
> it in any replies :).
>
> It turns out our documentation has been wrong and the following are not
> correct and more importantly don't work consistently over 10.04/12.04/14.04
> [2]:
> sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
> sudo restart networking
>
> The correct way I've been told is to use the ifupdown scripts. It's
> important to note that this is different on the desktop due to
> network-manager.
>
> I feel we need to publicly discuss if we really want the ifupdown scripts to
> be the only supported way to manage/restart networking.  We've been
> communicating the opposite for quite some time now..
>
> Related question:
> Do we not support giving users the ability to restart networking equivalent
> to rebooting the system?  (Upstart is used when booting, not when manually
> doing the ifupdown scripts).
>
>
> *More complicated network setups*
> There are many bugs in regards to bonds/vlans/bridging and other more
> complex networking setups.  It appears like it might be a limitation to how
> ifupdown is designed.
>
> We have had cases where the MTU needs to be set using a pre-up or post-up
> option in the interfaces file instead of a plain MTU line.
> Bond interfaces can cause significant pausing in boot/network restart
> The ifupdown script doesn't actually work on bonded interfaces [3]
>
> race condition updating statefile "sometimes networking interfaces won't
> come up" - was fixed [4]-
>
> We are seeing many more of cases involving complicated networking setups and
> with more OpenStack deployments this is going to become more of the norm.
>
> My understanding is that ifupdown was not designed to handle a parallel boot
> process like Upstart or systemd.  I'm guessing there are a lot more bugs
> lurking due to that, aside from some other issues with the codebase [5].
>
> *Future Releases*
> NetworkManager everywhere?  systemd-networkd?
>
> Thanks for discussing,
> Bryan
>
>
> [1]
> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/servercloud-1403-networking
> [2] If you want to see where those actually work see my document here:
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OBN3efJ1LmA0-0DzD3K0eUkIuQdscxLQ-QO1yi3bHeM/edit
> [3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ifenslave-2.6/+bug/1254120
> [4] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ifupdown/+bug/1160490
> [5]
> http://pureperl.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-debian-ifupdown-package-and.html
>
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-- 
Benjamin Kerensa
http://benjaminkerensa.com
"I am what I am because of who we all are" - Ubuntu