[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#361935: sysvinit: -i flag will not down interfaces without ip address

[Nils Rennebarth]

Package: sysvinit
Version: 2.86.ds1-1
Severity: normal

Network interfaces that are up but without ip address will not be taken down
if the -i flag is given to halt or reboot.

This is because Linux does not include such interfaces in its response to
SIOCGIFCONF. It seems, the only way to list all such interfaces at reboot
time, where neither /proc nor /sys is available, is to use NETLINK sockets
which are Linux specific. There once has been a short discussion on
the Linux-Kernel mailinglist in effort make Linux behave like BSD in this
respect, but the conclusion was to not change the SIOCGIFCONF behaviour, so
this will not be fixed in the future.

Btw, as network interfaces may be freely renamed, the code that excludes
shaper, lo and ':' names is somewhat shaky as well.

I admit that network interfaces are supposed to be managed with
/etc/network/interfaces and supposed to be taken down by
/etc/init.d/ifupdown, so the bug is not terribly important. Still it should
either work reliably or be dropped altogether because things that only happen
at reboot time are difficult to trace down and debug.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.15.4-up
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)

Versions of packages sysvinit depends on:
ii  coreutils                   5.2.1-2      The GNU core utilities
ii  initscripts                 2.86.ds1-1   Standard scripts needed for bootin
ii  libc6                       2.3.2.ds1-22 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  sysv-rc                     2.86.ds1-1   Standard boot mechanism using syml

-- no debconf information