[Hardy] network-admin settings to DHCP do not work

[Paul Smith]

On a newly-updated Hardy beta install I selected System -> Administration -> Network and chose my wired interface and Properties. The interface had the "Roaming mode" checkbox enabled and it was able to use DHCP to obtain an IP address, etc.

I unchecked the Roaming Mode box and selected DHCP in the "Configuration" box, then added my domain name to the "General" tab (the hostname was already there) and clicked OK and close.

I rebooted my system, and it was a huge mess:

 1) My ethernet interface was configured for IPV6 (!!) and no DHCP request was made (according to the log files). This means I couldn't access any of my DNS servers, which are only available via IPV4, among other things.

 2) My /etc/hosts file did not have an entry for my hostname "myhost"; there was ONLY an entry for "myhost.mydomain.com". This caused me to not be able to sudo anymore, since I got an error "host myhost not found".

Since I couldn't sudo I had to reboot off my CD, mount my root partition, and edit my /etc/hosts file to add "myhost" to the 127.0.0.1 IP address. Then I was able to reboot and re-enable roaming mode and thus get my eth0 interface to use ipv4 again.

I'm not exactly sure what changing the configuration in network-admin is supposed to do. I did see that it added a line "iface eth0 inet dhcp" to my /etc/network/interfaces file, which is what I would expect. However, after the reboot I could see form the logs that NetworkManager was still running; maybe that was interfering? For sure there were NO messages about dhcp in any of the log files after I rebooted.

[Michael Nagel (nailor)]

thanks for reporting, is this reproducible with non-beta releases?

[Paul Smith (psmith-gnu)]

I'll need to find a way to do a fresh install to test this. Maybe a vmware image. Let me see what I can do.

[Mackenzie Morgan (maco.m)]

I can confirm that Network Admin + DHCP = fail on Hardy. Since WEP doesn't work with Network Manager, I've attempted to use Network Admin when connecting to WEP-encrypted networks, since it'll at least take the WEP key. Unfortunately, no DHCP stuff happens with Network Admin set to DHCP. It's not the DHCP server's problem, because I can manually "sudo dhclient wlan0" and have it work just fine. I've given up on using a GUI for WEP-enabled networks since the network GUI that has DHCP refuses WEP keys, and the one that takes WEP keys refuses DHCP.

[patriciaosullivan (patriciaosullivan)]

This is a serious problem, and may prevent lots of users trying to persist with Ubuntu. Network Manager is seriously faulty:

Trying to configure a WPA network key results in a corrupted key being stored, which prevents access to any network. This is persistant and replicable on ANY machine I've tried with ANY wireless chipset.

The ONLY way to fix this is either to mend Network Manager, or to replace it with WICD. WICD works with EVERY machine I've tried, but installation isn't trivial (particularly for a newbie). Network Manager seems to be very problematical - WICD just works properly.

[Mackenzie Morgan (maco.m)]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 12:11 PM, patriciaosullivan
<email address hidden> wrote:
> Trying to configure a WPA network key results in a corrupted key being
> stored, which prevents access to any network. This is persistant and
> replicable on ANY machine I've tried with ANY wireless chipset.

I haven't noticed this problem. WPA has not given me any problems at
all. Only WEP creates problems. Additionally, this bug report is
about network-admin, not network-manager.

[Mackenzie Morgan (maco.m)]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 12:32 PM, Mackenzie Morgan <email address hidden> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 12:11 PM, patriciaosullivan
> <email address hidden> wrote:
>> Trying to configure a WPA network key results in a corrupted key being
>> stored, which prevents access to any network. This is persistant and
>> replicable on ANY machine I've tried with ANY wireless chipset.
>
> I haven't noticed this problem. WPA has not given me any problems at
> all. Only WEP creates problems. Additionally, this bug report is
> about network-admin, not network-manager.

Should say: WPA with Network Manager has not given me any problems at
all. And more specifically, I should mention that ipw3945, iwl3945,
and iwl4965 are the ones I've used with no errors.

[Akdo (menoft)]

Hi same problem on hardy 8.04.1 , dhcp not work with network-admin !

I have this in interfaces file after manual configuration with network-admin

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-psk <key>
wpa-driver wext
wpa-key-mgmt WPA-PSK
wpa-proto WPA
wpa-ssid <name>

But with same configuration when i do this :

$sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

 * Reconfiguring network interfaces... There is already a pid file /var/run/dhclient.wlan0.pid with pid 26885
killed old client process, removed PID file
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.6
Copyright 2004-2007 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/

Listening on LPF/wlan0/00:1a:73:0e:aa:5f
Sending on LPF/wlan0/00:1a:73:0e:aa:5f
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPRELEASE on wlan0 to 192.168.0.254 port 67
There is already a pid file /var/run/dhclient.wlan0.pid with pid 134519072
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.6
Copyright 2004-2007 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/

Listening on LPF/wlan0/00:1a:73:0e:aa:5f
Sending on LPF/wlan0/00:1a:73:0e:aa:5f
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 8
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 13
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 10
DHCPOFFER of 192.168.0.1 from 192.168.0.254
DHCPREQUEST of 192.168.0.1 on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPACK of 192.168.0.1 from 192.168.0.254
bound to 192.168.0.1 -- renewal in 368043 seconds.
                                                                         [ OK ]

This works !!!

Problem with interface who kill prematurely the process ?

[Thomas Hood (jdthood)]

Paul Smith wrote:
> and edit my /etc/hosts file to add "myhost" to the 127.0.0.1 IP address

Actually you should edit /etc/hosts to add "myhost" to the line 127.0.1.1, yielding:

    127.0.0.1 localhost
    127.0.1.1 myhost

[Thomas Hood (jdthood)]

> My /etc/hosts file did not have an entry for my hostname "myhost"; there was ONLY an entry for "myhost.mydomain.com".

If gnome-system-tools does this then it has a bug. (I don't dare install or run the
GNOME network configurator on my machine. In the past it would utterly botch
Debian/Ubuntu configuration files. Perhaps things have improved in recent years.)

The entry for myhost in /etc/hosts (where "myhost" is the system hostname, i.e.,
the content of /etc/hostname and the output of the "hostname" command) should be:

   <IP address> myhost.mydomain.com myhost

or

   <IP address> myhost

if the machine doesn't have a permanent FQDN.

The IP address should be the machine's permanent IP address if it has one and 127.0.1.1 if it does not.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for the report Paul Smith , It has been a long time without any comment or a duplicate in this bug report and It is possible that the bug has been fixed. May you please try to reproduce it with the latest Stable Release of Ubuntu the Natty Narwhal and add the respective comments to the report? You can learn how to get that release at http://www.ubuntu.com/download . Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for gnome-system-tools (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]