Re: shutdown hangs at "deconfiguring network interfaces"

[Elizabeth Barham <soggytrousers@yahoo.com>]

solutrean <j.carrigan@attbi.com> writes:

> The title sez it all. here are some particulars:
> 
> athlon t-bird 750, all-scsi, 393M RAM, Debian testing.
> 
> this is my first post to the list - I apologize for any improper netiquette.
> I googled for this condition, but found nothing.

I had this for a while. Lets take a look at what is happening:

>From /etc/init.d/networking:

    stop)

	[...]
            echo -n "Deconfiguring network interfaces: "
            ifdown -a
	    echo "done."
	[...]

>From ifdown(8):

FILES
       /etc/network/interfaces
              Descriptions  of  all  the  network  interfaces the
              system has.

       /etc/network/ifstate
              Current state of network interfaces.

In my case, there were interfaces that were not up that ifstate said
were up. Why? Because /etc/rcS.d/S39ifupdown was causing a
segmentation fault. Why? Because I had compiled a newer version of
libstdc++ when using the potato distribution and after upgrading to
woody, applications were using the one I compiled in /usr/local and
not the one that came with woody. Deleting my library in /usr/local/
most likely cured it although I recall writing a script to do the
following:

As a quick work-around, try wiping out /etc/network/ifstate and see if
you continue to have the problem (echo -n > /etc/network/ifstate)
right before shutting down. If that works, you might want to add that
to /etc/init.d/networking right before the "ifdown -a" part mentioned
above.

HTH,

Elizabeth