Re: bookworm and network connections
On Fri, Sep 01, 2023 at 08:40:43PM -0500, David Wright wrote:
> I know you have a low opinion of allow-hotplug, but I can't see that
> auto/allow-auto is necessarily better for the naive user that doesn't
> install a DE for whatever reason.
>
> AIUI auto gives you a one-shot attempt to start the network at boot
> time, and if that fails for any reason (eg USB not yet plugged in/
> not detected/hardblocked on/etc), you get a long timeout before the
> login prompt, and may have to reboot to get it to attempt again.
>
> OTOH allow-hotplug gets you to a login prompt as normal, without the
> network being up, and then rectifying the problem makes ifupdown/udev
> automatically have another go.
It depends on the hardware, and how the system is going to be used.
A built-in ethernet interface SHOULD NOT be configured as "allow-hotplug".
It should be "auto". I'd argue that the same applies to a PCI card or
other non-built-in but internal device. If you have to take the machine
apart to remove the device, it's "auto".
allow-hotplug is intended for things like USB ethernet interfaces, as
you mention. They're literally hot-pluggable, and may not be present
when the system is booted. If you're dealing with one of those, then
by all means, use allow-hotplug for it. That's what it's for.
My gripe is that the installer has (traditionally?) used allow-hotplug for
ALL ethernet interfaces, including the built-in interfaces on a server.
This causes massive problems with the ordering of service initializations
at boot. It took me a *long* time and a lot of digging to figure out why
things were breaking, so I try to pass that knowledge along for others.
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