Debian Bug report logs - #810934
Please hide initramfs eth card from NetworkManager more robustly

Reply or subscribe to this bug.

Toggle useless messages

Message #5 received at submit@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Martin Pitt <mpitt@debian.org>

To: Debian BTS Submit <submit@bugs.debian.org>

Cc: Guus Sliepen <guus@debian.org>, Michael Biebl <biebl@debian.org>

Subject: Please hide initramfs eth card from NetworkManager more robustly

Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2016 23:18:07 +0100

Package: ltsp
Version: 5.5.5-1

Hello,

ifupdown recently went through some changes (details in
I https://bugs.debian.org/809166, to a lesser degree in
https://bugs.debian.org/809169) which currently "ifconfig IFACE down"
an interface which is "manual".

LTSP currently creates such a "manual" interface stanza in
https://sources.debian.net/src/ltsp/5.5.5-1/client/share/ltsp/init-ltsp.d/50-interfaces/:

  auto $DEVICE
  iface $DEVICE inet ${NET_DEVICE_METHOD:-"manual"}

whose purpose is to hide the devide from NetworkManager. This
will now break with ifupdown 0.8 as (1) "manual" interfaces are now
downed with "ifdown", and (2) networking.service lost the
check_network_file_systems() safety check from /etc/init.d/networking
which prevented calling ifdown during shutdown if the root fs is
remote.

It's still being discussed whether ifupdown should go back to the old
behaviour (in https://bugs.debian.org/809166), but there are good
reasons for the current one as this makes use cases with e. g. bond
interfaces easier.

To avoid relying on the fine semantics of this, it would be great if
ltsp could more directly express what it really wants to do by
creating a /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/ltsp.conf snippet instead with

  [keyfile]
  unmanaged-devices=interface-name=$DEVICE

This should be a straightforward change in init-ltsp.d/50-interfaces.

Thanks for considering,

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)

Message #10 received at 810934@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Alkis Georgopoulos <alkisg@gmail.com>

To: 810934@bugs.debian.org

Subject: Re: Please hide initramfs eth card from NetworkManager more robustly

Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2016 14:43:20 +0200

> it would be great if ltsp could more directly express what it really
> wants to do by creating a /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/ltsp.conf snippet

Some thoughts on this:

1) LTSP chroots don't have network-manager installed by default, they 
are minimal images generated by debootstrap.
It's possible to build LTSP "fat" chroots that do have nm installed 
though (along with a whole desktop environment).

2) Even if nm was installed, ifupdown would still ifdown the interfaces 
on shutdown (with the old ifupdown behaviour), right? So creating 
/etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/ltsp.conf wouldn't help there, would it?

3) Conceptually, ifupdown's "manual" isn't exactly the same as 
network-manager's "unmanaged". For example, nm could allow the users to 
see the connection speed or status or add VPNs over it, without allowing 
them to activate/deactivate the interface.

4) It's also possible to netboot clients using AoE (ATA over Ethernet), 
where the root file system is accessible with ethernet packets even if 
the interface doesn't have an IP, the only prerequisite is for it to 
always be up. So if nm could respect that, then it could manage the 
interface normally, it could use dhclient to assign an IP to it etc.

I just wanted to mention these thoughts, I'll leave it up to the LTSP 
Debian maintainer to decide if he wants to tag the connection as 
unmanaged or not.
Cheers!

Send a report that this bug log contains spam.