Bug#606654: Busybox should include arping applet
Hi,
On Friday, December 10, 2010 05:12:39 pm Ferenc Wagner wrote:
> Floris Bos <bos@je-eigen-domein.nl> writes:
> > I think the arping applet should be enabled in the Busybox build.
> > It helps a great deal in debugging general network issues and could be
> > helpful to create a solution for some other bugs like:
> >
> > http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=537271 (network may not
> > be usable as soon as link is up)
> > http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=606515 (Preseed
> > installation does not wait for network to be ready)
> Please read
> http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/FAQ#Q.3AWhyispingnotavailableinthede
> bugshell
>
> Roughly the same applies to arping. After all, you can cat /proc/net/arp
> to check whether the gateway has a complete entry.
But wouldn't you need to initiate network communication before an entry in
/proc/net/arp for the gateway appears?
Right now PXE preseed installations are broken, making Debian unsuitable for
use by dedicated server providers.
The Debian installer does not wait for the network link to come up (can take
about 3 seconds on some NICs connected to a standard Gigabit switch),
nor does it take into account that it can take 30 seconds before network
activity is possible in spanning tree configurations.
A simply 1-line fix if we had arping might be executing between netcfg and
network-preseed:
arping -f -c 35 $GATEWAY_IP
(wait until you get an ARP reply from the gateway, timeout after 35
seconds/tries).
I don't think calling wget 35 times, and grepping /proc/net/arp is a clean
alternative, just to save 4 KB of space.
--
Yours sincerely,
Floris Bos
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