Hi,
I've got a newish X-series server running Etch that has a Broadcom NIC using
the BNX2 driver, all set up statically in interfaces (and I've commented out
the "allow-hotplug" line for that interface).
When the server boots, I see the NIC start to come online, but then other
services begin loading while the card is still doing port negotiation, etc.
This causes cascading failures with the next batch of services to come
online (ISCSI, LVM, etc), leading to an unclean boot. Evidence for the fact
that networking is backgrounding comes in startup lines like the following:
"Starting Samba daemons:nmbdbnx2: eth0 NIC Link is Up, 100Mbps full duplex
smbd.
Starting OpenBSD Secure Shell server: sshdNET:Registered protocol family 10"
What I really need is for the networking subsystem to block rather than
background until the NIC is fully alive. I'd rather not resort to some
"until ping" kind of kludge, or the kludge I've currently stubbed off with,
where I do a "wait 60" on the next service that depends on a live NIC, but
would prefer to simply have networking wait for full comms to be established
before passing control on to the next service startup. Given how long it
takes an X-Series just to boot out of BIOS, a few extra seconds waiting for
networking to be established really doesn't matter - but ISCSI missing its
mounts surely does!
Cheers,
Mike Ely