[intrepid] network manager has startup race

[Stephan Trebels]

Binary package hint: network-manager

NetworkManager fails the initial startup, but when restarted starts cleanly. Killing off nm-system-settings with NetworkManager down and then starting up does not suffice to replicate this situation.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

have you checked that the process isnt running at all? maybe it didnt properly connect to dbus on startup or something.

If not, do we see the startup failure in some log?

[Stephan Trebels (ncubede)]

I think I'll add a bit of debug to my private version of NetworkManager...

I only saw the [fail] on the console, and NetworkManager did certainly run, so did nm-system-settings. I wondered whether dbus or hal were not up properly, yet, at the time NetworkManager was started.

The logs are in the original bug in the after-boot.zip

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

its strange, NM should spit out something to syslog. How could it spit out fail when its actually running?

[Stephan Trebels (ncubede)]

I traced this part now. It seems that it is not NetworkManager per se, but rather start-stop-daemon complaining that NetworkManager is already running. Now I have to find which other mechanism has started NetworkManager earlier. The rc*.d links look perfectly ok... Looking...

This now could be an upgrade issue or a subtle change in ubuntu usage of runlevels...

[Stephan Trebels (ncubede)]

This appears to be in upstart, not network manager. Somehow the rc2 symlinks are started twice, at least I see atd complaining about being started twice as well. Only NetworkManager really fails if being started while running. I suspect that some of the underlying infrastructure like dbus does not handle this gracefully and then nm-applet connects to a different dbus than the running NetworkManager. This also explains, why a restart of NetworkManager resolves the issue.

[Stephan Trebels (ncubede)]

I fixed the double startup problem in /etc/init.d/rc, will report the issue there.
The startup race with NetworkManager persists, though, so this was nto the issue.

[Stephan Trebels (ncubede)]

double startup issue was: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sysvinit/+bug/303074

[Ralph Janke (txwikinger)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue for you. Can you try with the latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for network-manager (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]