slow boot and network racecondition

[Per Hermansson]

On rare ocation Ubuntu boots really slowly and after awhile the usplash boot screen disapears. Instead the terminal is shown and, amongst others, the following lines:

Starting AFS service: openafs afsd.
ADVISEADDR: Error in specifying interface addresses: No existing IP interface found.

Since this problem isn't occurring every time one explanation might be some kind of race condition with starting my network interfaces.
I'm attaching my 'messages' log file during the boot if it might help. Although the afs error doesn't seems to be specified in any log file (only in the terminal).

[Marty Vona (vona)]

I am seeing this too, after switching from a static IP address to DHCP. This may be a duplicate of 249240, see comments there.

[Russ Allbery (rra-debian)]

Does this problem disappear if you enable dynroot via dpkg-reconfigure openafs-client? If so, it's fixed in 1.4.8.dfsg1-1 and later, which uses dynroot by default.

[Per Hermansson (hermansson-per)]

I'm not sure since I reported this some time ago, but since then I've set dynroot to true and I think the slow boot symptom haven't appeared after that. So enabling that is a good workaround.

[Russ Allbery (rra-debian)]

Per Hermansson <email address hidden> writes:

> I'm not sure since I reported this some time ago, but since then I've
> set dynroot to true and I think the slow boot symptom haven't appeared
> after that. So enabling that is a good workaround.

Okay, cool. I think that's actually the solution. It increasingly makes
little sense to run AFS without dynroot. In a future version of the
package, I may change the debconf template to make it clear that you don't
want to disable that (now that it's the default) unless you have a static
IP address configured at boot. Without dynroot, AFS tries to talk to the
local VLDBs as soon as it starts, which isn't ever going to work if your
network comes up at some unknown point later in the boot process (which is
the case if you're using something like Network Manager).

--
Russ Allbery (<email address hidden>) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

[Russ Allbery (rra-debian)]

Fixed in 1.4.8.dfsg1-1 by making dynroot the default for new installations.

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

This bug was fixed in Jaunty. If you need this fix in a previous Ubuntu release, you can try the backported packages at https://launchpad.net/~anders-kaseorg/+archive/openafs .