Comment 2 for bug 6841

Message-Id: <email address hidden>
Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 14:53:30 +0200
From: Helge Hafting <email address hidden>
To: Debian Bug Tracking System <email address hidden>
Subject: ifupdown hangs pc either in boot or shutdown

Package: ifupdown
Version: 0.6.4-4.8
Severity: critical
Justification: breaks the whole system

For a long time, I have been unable to shutdown the pc. Today
I figured out why.

My /etc/network/interfaces contains the line
auto lo eth0
in order to bring up both the loopback and the ethernet
interfaces. Documentation supports this config.

Unfortunately, this means ifupdown brings down "lo" too at
shutdown time, and that hangs shutdown because the
command "ifdown -a" which is part of this package never
ever completes. It hangs - forever.
(I can bring down lo anythime with ifconfig, but not with ifdown)

I tried to simply remove "lo" from "interfaces". That
wreaks havoc on the boot, because "lo" does not come up
and ifup hangs. So I tried a simple workaround, by putting
"ifconfig lo up" in another script so that lo is up
when "ifup -a" runs. Unfortunately, this didd not help.
"ifup -a" still hangs, "making the whole system unuseable".

So I am stuck.
ifup seems to really need to bring up lo itself.
ifdown seems to really need to _not_ touch lo.
(Removing lo from "interfaces" and "ifstate" before
shutting down lets me shot down normally)

Rebooting this machine remotely is completely impossible,
It will either get stuck shutting down or while booting.
Getting stuck at shutdown is easy, because sysrq+S+U+B
shuts down the filesystems and reboots without
furter shutdown scripts. Unfortunately, I have to be
at the console to do this.
Getting stuck at boot means to boot with init=/bin/sh
and then fix the config files and reboots. This is a major
annoyance.

ifup and ifdown seems to be broken, unfortunately netbase
depends on the ifupdown package when using debian testing.

Helge Hafting

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.7-mm3
Locale: LANG=no_NO.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=no_NO.UTF-8

Versions of packages ifupdown depends on:
ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.4.28 Debian configuration management sy
ii libc6 2.3.2.ds1-13 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii net-tools 1.60-10 The NET-3 networking toolkit

-- debconf information:
  ifupdown/convert-interfaces: true