Ubuntu 8.10 booting hangs for a while on "configuring network interfaces" on iwl3945 and iwl4965

[manolo]

It seems to bring up the interface successfully, then freeze for a while and start over. This happens both on intel 3945 and 4965 chipsets.

The source of the problem is the value of timeout in /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf. Changing it (from the original 60) to 5 or 10 decreases the freeze time.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

that's not a yelp bug this report needs to be re assigned.

[manolo (mac-man2005)]

How can I reassign it? And what should I reassign it to?
Thanks.

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

manolo, don't worry about re-assigning, we'll take care of that

tell me something: why do you have ndiswrapper installed? i see you have the intel 3945 wifi

[manolo (mac-man2005)]

Hi azimout.I have some possible mess cause I've been doing a lot of tries, the last was installing ndiswrapper on Ubuntu 8.04. Then I upgraded to 8.10...> From: <email address hidden>> To: <email address hidden>> Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2008 21:08:50 +0000> Subject: [Bug 293023] Re: Ubuntu 8.10 hangs for a while on "configuring network interfaces" while booting> > manolo, don't worry about re-assigning, we'll take care of that> > tell me something: why do you have ndiswrapper installed? i see you have> the intel 3945 wifi> > ** Changed in: ubuntu> Status: New => Incomplete> > ** Changed in: linux (Ubuntu)> Sourcepackagename: None => linux> > -- > Ubuntu 8.10 hangs for a while on "configuring network interfaces" while booting> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/293023> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber> of the bug.
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[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

you never needed ndiswrapper. intel 3945abg works out of the box both on 8.04 and 8.10
remove it by running "sudo aptitude purge ndiswrapper"
tell us if you still have a problem...

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

I'm also having this issue with Intrepid. It hangs about 2:20 minutes during boot at configuring network interfaces. I have intel 3945ABG and I don't have ndiswrapper installed. Bootup time does not depend on if there is wlan connectivity or not. I have an HP nw8440 laptop. See attached bootchart image.

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

adam, can you please attach the output of lspci -nn?

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

Here you go:

[manolo (mac-man2005)]

I opened a bug resulting to be a duplicate of this one. I'm attaching my lspci too.
Thanks for your time.
Manolo.

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

adam, this is strange, i have the exact same wireless and don't have this issue...

manolo, i cannot find your duplicate bug report. which one is it?

also, i noticed that 290230 (marked as a duplicate of this one by adam) is about iwl4965, not iwl3945... maybe we should change the title/description?

[manolo (mac-man2005)]

@ Dimitrios Symeonidis
Sorry, I was wrong about bug duplicates.

As you can see from my "lspci -nn" I have got a
03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection [8086:4222] (rev 02)

so I suppose the current title is good for me.

Now, what can I do to solve my problem?

Thanks for your attention.
Regards.

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

adam, please attach dmesg

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

manolo, have you run "sudo aptitude purge ndiswrapper" as i asked above?

[manolo (mac-man2005)]

I have run it few minutes ago, now I suppose I should reboot and see what happens...
Thanks.

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

Attaching dmesg.

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

i'm attaching my own dmesg. it seems like it might be doing something similar on my machine, but for less time (~15 seconds). i will now reboot and confirm this

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

what is quite suspicious is that it seems to initialize everything, then it does a
[ 20.145753] iwl3945 0000:05:00.0: PCI INT A disabled
and after a while (15 secs for me, 140 for you) it starts again...

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

interesting:
http://www.intellinuxwireless.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1778
which points to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/263059

[manolo (mac-man2005)]

So, should I blacklist iwl3945 ?!? Which driver will be loaded then?!?

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

confirming. importance=low in accordance with https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Importance

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

manolo, don't blacklist anything

[manolo (mac-man2005)]

I attach my own dmesg.

It hangs on boot while:
- pressing F1 I can see: Kinit: No resume image, doing normal boot
- pressing F7 I can see:
         Serring kernel variables (/etc/sysctl.d/30-tracker.conf)
         configuring network interfaces blocks. [here it hangs for a while, and that "blocks" sometimes is not present]
         starting portmap daemon

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

Issue remains after the kernel upgrade. 2.6.27-9

[Mozg (andrei-arhont)]

I can confirm that. My laptop just froze after heavy downloading of several torrent files. Was using 2.6.27-9 amd64.

------Original Message------
From: Adam Niedling
Sender: <email address hidden>
To: <email address hidden>
ReplyTo: Bug 293023
Subject: [Bug 293023] Re: Ubuntu 8.10 booting hangs for a while on"configuring network interfaces" on iwl3945 and iwl4965
Sent: 28 Nov 2008 18:49

Issue remains after the kernel upgrade. 2.6.27-9

--
Ubuntu 8.10 booting hangs for a while on "configuring network interfaces" on iwl3945 and iwl4965
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/293023
You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
of a duplicate bug.

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

Mozg: you're having a different problem. Our issue is that Ubuntu hangs for minutes during boot time.

[manolo (mac-man2005)]

I confirm: issue remains after the kernel upgrade 2.6.27-9 on Ubuntu 8.10
Any suggestion, please?

[Leo von Klenze (devel-leo)]

I have the same issue.

Ubuntu 8.10 hangs a while by "Configuring network devices..." if no configured wlan is reachable.

System Informations:
----------------------------
uname -a
Linux dagobert 2.6.27-10-generic #1 SMP Fri Nov 21 19:19:18 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux

lspci | grep Network
0c:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN [Kedron] Network Connection (rev 61)

/etc/network/interfaces:
iface lo inet loopback
iface wlan1 inet dhcp
    wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
auto lo
auto wlan1

NetworkManager is not installed! With NetworkManager installed and commenting out the entries in /etc/network/interfaces the problem is solved. But the NM doesn't work for me so I don't want to use it.
----------------------

In Ubuntu 8.04 all works fine.
If a network configured in wpa_supplicant.conf is in range Ubuntu boots just fast and fine.

Thanks for any suggestions.

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

can you guys tell me the value of "timeout" in /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf ?
try changing that to something like 5 or 10 and tell me if it speeds up your boot process...

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

It was set to #timeout 60. After uncommenting and setting it to 5 the hang was only a few (5) seconds. See attached dmesg. Thanks!

[manolo (mac-man2005)]

That's my dmesg: how can I realize how long did it hanged?

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

Manolo, dmesg messages are asynchronous, so not a good measure to judge boot time delays.
I would suggest installing bootchart, rebooting and then looking at the graphs in /var/log/bootchart

For now I would suggest changing the value of timeout to something lower (maybe 5 or 10). The next version of Ubuntu (9.04, coming out in April), as well as the general direction of Linux kernel development, is to speed up boot time. So just wait for the next release to come out, I believe it will provide a more permanent fix to this (and other) boot speed issues.

[Leo von Klenze (devel-leo)]

I set the timeout value to 5. After that, Ubuntu boots faster but I have still a delay for 20 seconds. It is better than one and a half minute but still annoying if sitting in the train and waiting for linux to come up. Maybe I will try it with the use of different runlevels (to disable network at startup).

Thanks for the workaround.

[manolo (mac-man2005)]

It still hangs a lot... I suppose nothing changed. Actually I just modified the number of seconds of that timeout (from 60 to 5) in /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf but without uncommenting the corresponding line (I didn't realize there was a '#' precedeing the corresponding line...)
Anyway, I'm attach that log chart and remark my precedeing dmesg refers to the (actually unmodified, because of that '#'). Now I reboot and attach a new chart referring tu the uncommented dhclient.conf

Stay tuned ;)
Thanks for your time!

[manolo (mac-man2005)]

Well.... definitely shorter boot time!!!

[Leo von Klenze (devel-leo)]

Wow.
You dhclient is definitly much faster than mine? What did you set the timeout value to?

I set it to 5 (perhaps uncommenting it, too ;-) )

[manolo (mac-man2005)]

I set it to 5... but actually I'm asking to myself waht about setting it to zero?!?!
What does that paramether needed?

[Leo von Klenze (devel-leo)]

I think setting to zero is not a good idea.

I have configured a netbook with an atheros network card yesterday. After setting timeout to 5, I was not able to get an IP address so I had to increase the value to 10.

As far as I have seen from the output, the network card was not ready in 5 seconds, so the first dhcp request was not successful and is waiting for some seconds like this:

  DHCPDISCOVER on wlan1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 6
  No DHCPOFFERS received.

If timeout is 5, no more discovers are made, instead the dhcplient cancels. After setting timeout to 10 it worked because the second request has been answered.

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

I still don't understand why is this set to won't fix. How will the boot time speed up if bugs like this won't get fixed?

[Leo von Klenze (devel-leo)]

I think Adam is right. I don't understand it, too.

It worked just fine under Ubuntu 8.04, so I am almost sure this is a bug!

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

let's try and find what is the source of this...

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

I think I know what's the problem here. There was this famous bug #289466 where the network-manager didn't appear in some cases. That bug was fixed so nm-applet appeared for me but it couldn't do anything, everything was grayed out. I figured if I delete /etc/network/interfaces then nm-applet is working fine. Deleting that file seems to fix this bug too, configuring network devices takes zero seconds now even after making back the changes of "timeout" in /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf . So I think the people with this issue also have the issue that nm-applet can't be used for anything.

[Leo von Klenze (devel-leo)]

You are right, if I delete my /etc/network/interfaces there is no delay on booting. But this is not a solution because you need the file for configuring the network interfaces. I don't want to use the network manager and I think the Ubuntu network should not depend on it.

For me the basic configuration with /etc/network/interfaces works much better than the network manager. (Multiple default routes, proper handling of access point selection with wpa_supplicant, even with hidden networks).

So deleting the file and using the network manager would be a workaround but no fix for this bug.

[Leo von Klenze (devel-leo)]

Another workaround for those who don't want to use the network manager:

I set the method of my wlan interface to manual in /etc/network/interfaces:

    iface wlan1 inet manual
        wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
        post-up /etc/network/dhclient-wrapper &
        post-down [ -f /var/run/dhclient.wlan1.pid ] && kill `cat /var/run/dhclient.wlan1.pid`

To get an IP adress from an dhcp server I wrote the attached script dhclient-wrapper. It calls the dhclient3 with parameter -1. If the dhclient cannot obtain an address it exits with code 2. In this case I deactivate the wlan interface in the script.
However the & makes the script running in the background preventing Ubuntu from hanging while it boots up.

The post-down statement is for killing the dhclient programm if the interface is deactivated.

[Leo von Klenze (devel-leo)]

Bootchart before workaround

[Leo von Klenze (devel-leo)]

Bootchart after workaround.

The boot process continues while dhclient is obtaining an address...

[Guido (vit-kotacka)]

I confirm this. System hangs during a boot sequence on "Configuring network interfaces". It has started to happen after the 8.04 -> 8.10 upgrade.

It works fine after commenting eth0 interface in the /etc/network/interfaces. Network manager applet didn't show wire connection before the interface commenting, but it works fine after this commenting.

[Brad Figg (brad-figg)]

This bug was filed against a series that is no longer supported and so is being marked as Won't Fix. If this issue still exists in a supported series, please file a new bug.

This change has been made by an automated script, maintained by the Ubuntu Kernel Team.