Bug#816076: wicd-daemon: upgrade reconfigures static ethernet interface, and kills ssh sessions.
Hi,
On 2016-04-20 21:05:47 +1000, Andrew Vaughan wrote:
> On 20 April 2016 at 19:58, Vincent Lefevre <vincent@vinc17.net> wrote:
> > Probably the same bug as bug 557156 (from 2009!). The problem is that
> > wicd-daemon tries to reconfigure the ethernet interface even though
> > it is configured not to connect to it automatically (which should be
> > and is the default). A workaround is to remove eth0 from the wicd
> > configuration.
Concerning the problem I had, it was apparently a documentation bug.
I've submitted a patch for the wicd-manager-settings.conf(5) man page.
> As far as I am aware, I have never touched the wicd config files. And a
> package shouldn't ship with a config that will break an otherwise valid
> configuration belonging to a different package on package upgrade.
The problem in your case was that you managed eth0 with both ifupdown
and wicd, which is obviously wrong. I thought that the default
configuration instructed that the wired interface wasn't managed
by default, but this was the documentation bug. If an interface
name is provided, then it will be managed by wicd automatically.
IMHO, the default config file should be written in such a way that
a wired interface is not managed by wicd because it could already
be managed in some other way. Unfortunately the usual choice is to
configure things at much as possible even though this may be broken
(for instance, just after installing postfix, a daemon is started
with a basic config file that rejects received mail, which is really
bad when re-installing a machine).
If the default config file isn't changed, recommending wicd is wrong,
IMHO.
If the wired interface is deconfigured during a wicd upgrade, this is
also wrong, as this can break upgrade via SSH.
> Now for the new stuff. Today I removed wicd and related packages.
> I'm pretty sure I purged the config files. To cut a long story short,
> purging wicd and related packages resulted in eth0 having it's IPv4
> address removed. Eth0 was still up with a IPv6 address. But the
> machine was no longer reachable over IPv4. Probably just a
> different variant of the same underlying buggy behaviour.
I think that if the wired interface is managed by wicd, then it makes
sense to deconfigure it when purging wicd (and even just removing it),
because the interface wouldn't be controlled in any way, with no
possibility of clean-up.
--
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
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