dbus/udev send NFS client connection out out the wrong interface

[Brian Morris]

I apologize for being vague , but I am not certain which package is responsible for this bug. Both dbus and udev are the most likely candidates as both contain recent change logs that mention "Interface 00" binding. Both were upgraded during the application of all waiting system updates for Ubuntu Server 12.04.2 LTS on 03/22/2013, and the previous patch application before that was mid-December 2012.

After applying all waiting updates on 03/22 we began to notice that MPI jobs were failing on our HPC clusters. This behavior was traced down to NFS (which was not updated in this patch cycle) clients improperly routing traffic. These clients use NFS on a VLAN that is unique to each cluster, which is only accessible to each node on their eth1 interface. On the nodes that would still work we noticed that the NFS mount had bound to the client address (clientaddr) of eth1, and on the nodes that were no longer functioning they had bound to '0.0.0.0' instead. This behavior was proven by finding a high count of discarded packets at hop 1, as the upstream router is not aware of each cluster's internal VLAN.

I could not get this behavior to change simply by remounting, but it can definitely change after a reboot. For one 'up' cycle the NFS mount may bind to eth1, and on the next it may bind to 0.0.0.0 instead. Manually configuring each node's NFS mounts in /etc/fstab to use the client address of eth1 (clientaddr=<eth1's address>) corrects the issue, but this extra configuration has never been needed in the past, nor can I find any documentation regarding this change.

Here is the complete list of what was updated in this patch cycle:

dmsetup
apparmor
apport
apt
apt-transport-https
apt-utils
base-files
bind9-host
dnsutils
dpkg
gir1.2-gudev-1.0
gnupg
gpgv
grub-common
grub-pc
grub-pc-bin
grub2-common
initramfs-tools
initramfs-tools-bin
iptables
isc-dhcp-client
isc-dhcp-common
language-pack-en
language-pack-en-base
language-selector-common
libapt-inst1.4
libapt-pkg4.12
libbind9-80
libdbus-glib-1-2
libdevmapper1.02.1
libdns81
libdrm-intel1
libdrm-nouveau1a
libdrm-radeon1
libdrm2
libfreetype6
libgnutls26
libgudev-1.0-0
libisc83
libisccc80
libisccfg82
liblwres80
libmysqlclient18
libnih-dbus1
libnih1
libpciaccess0
libplymouth2
libssl1.0.0
libudev0
libxml2
linux-headers-server
linux-image-server
linux-server
man-db
mountall
mysql-common
openssl
perl
perl-base
perl-modules
plymouth
Plymouth-theme-ubuntu-text
postfix
puppet
puppet-common
python-apport
python-problem-report
sudo
ubuntu-minimal
ubuntu-standard
udev
upstart
x11-common