Our Networking Story

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

On 6 March 2014 21:32, Benjamin Kerensa <bkerensa at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Why was it  necessary to have discussions internally when they could
> have been open by default?
>

Eh... this particular bug is public and well known in both Debian and
Ubuntu for a long time now.
As you can see in that email, he references a few things dating back
more than a year ago, but there is more one can dig through in
launchpad bug reports.

It's just it's making a new round of discussions about it, and he is
bringing this topic up at the upcomming UDS and is advertising the
session in advance =) to gather together relevant people.

Also, please do not top post, on ubuntu mailing list.

Regards,

Dimitri.

ps. Didn't you part Ubuntu Community?!


> 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
>
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-- 
Regards,

Dimitri.