Handling a network card automatically: Calling ifup from udev (Shallow Thoughts)

Handling a network card automatically: Calling ifup from udev

I'm experimenting with Ubuntu's "Hardy Heron" beta on the laptop, and one problem I've hit is that it never configures my network card properly.

The card is a cardbus 3Com card that uses the 3c59x driver. When I plug it in, or when I boot or resume after a suspend, the card ends up in a state where it shows up in ifconfig eth0, but it isn't marked UP. ifup eth0 says it's already up; ifdown eth0 complains error: SIOCDELRT: No such process but afterward, I can run ifup eth0 and this time it works. I've made an alias, net, that does sudo ifdown eth0; sudo ifup eth0. That's silly -- I wanted to fix it so it happened automatically.

Unfortunately, there's nothing written anywhere on debugging udev. I fiddled a little with udevmonitor and udevtest /class/net/eth0 and it looked like udev was in fact running the ifup rule in /etc/udev/rules.d/85-ifupdown.rules, which calls: /sbin/start-stop-daemon --start --background --pid file /var/run/network/bogus --startas /sbin/ifup -- --allow auto $env{INTERFACE} So I tried running that by hand (with $env{INTERFACE} being eth0) and, indeed, it didn't bring the interface up.

But that suggested a fix: how about adding --force to that ifup line? I don't know why the card is already in a state where ifup doesn't want to handle it, but it is, and maybe --force would fix it. Sure enough: that worked fine, and it even works when resuming after a suspend.

I filed bug 211955 including a description of the fix. Maybe there's some reason for not wanting to use --force in 85-ifupdown (why wouldn't you always want to configure a network card when it's added and is specified as auto and allow-hotplug in /etc/network/interfaces?) but if so, maybe someone will suggest a better fix.

Tags: linux, ubuntu, udev, networking
[ 14:41 Apr 04, 2008    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]