Comment 0 for bug 6801

Package: hotplug
Version: 0.0.20040329-8
Severity: critical
Justification: breaks the whole system

 I hope I'm not over-stating the severity of this bug, but a machine in a
co-location facility that doesn't come up after a reboot is a Big Problem.
(no, that didn't actually happen to me.)

 After installing Sarge on some new hardware, I did something that made the
machine power off without doing a shutdown(8). When I booted up again, lo
and eth1 weren't configured. (eth0 isn't either, but it's not supposed to
be. don't ask.) One of the boot messages was
ifup: interface lo already configured. But of course it wasn't, as an
ifconfig -a showed. A clean reboot after that cured the problem. (of
course, so did /etc/init.d/networking restart, but newbies who just
installed Sarge won't know that.)

 While digging into this, I found bugs 244617 and 245067 which shed some
light on the situation. I've read them, and I haven't thought of anything
brilliant that would solve things either. :( However, it needs to be
stressed that this can and does cause real problems for real systems. Most
machines in co-location facilities don't _need_ hotplug, but
debian-installer installs it by default. Admins would have to remove it to
make sure they don't lose access after a power outage longer than their UPS
can handle. Besides that, it's often nice to be able to ssh into remote
machines that have come back up after a crash. e.g. a desktop machine at
work while you're at home. Anyway, I hope this is enough reason to make a
critical bug report. I don't think sarge should ship with a default install
that doesn't come up after a crash.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.4.26-1-386
Locale: LANG=en_CA, LC_CTYPE=en_CA

Versions of packages hotplug depends on:
ii debconf 1.4.25 Debian configuration management sy
ii modutils 2.4.26-1 Linux module utilities
ii procps 1:3.2.1-2 The /proc file system utilities

-- debconf information:
  hotplug/ignore_pci_class_display: true
  hotplug/net_agent_policy: hotplug
* hotplug/usb_keyboard:
  hotplug/static_module_list:
  hotplug/x11_usbmice_hack: false