[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#533233: ipd should not overwrite route when other interfaces are configured

[Jose David]

> Here's exactly what happens. The system has two interfaces, eth0 and
> wlan0. Without an ethernet cable connected (standard since this is a
> laptop), the wlan0 interfaces gets an IP address quickly from dhcp and
> becomes the default route. Slightly after this (around 1 minute),
> avahi seems to timeout after being unable to get an IP address for
> eth0 (there's no cable after all) and gets an APIPA address for eth0
> (and eth0:avahi) which then becomes the default route. But why is an
> interface that is down even being added to the route? And why is it
> "stealing" the default route from the properly configured interfaces?
>
> Bringing eth0 down fixes it only temporarily. A few minutes after
> running 'ifconfig eth0 down', that interface comes up again
> automatically and becoming the default route (wrong). I have "fixed"
> tis temporarily by commenting all the eth0 lines in
> /etc/network/interfaces

Exactly the same problem and the same fix for me. FWIW, I am using a
new laptop (amd64 arch, rtl8723ae wifi hardware) running a fresh
Debian unstable system (installed two days ago) with avahi 0.6.31-4+b2
and network-manager 0.9.10-5.

The problem is quite easy to diagnose and fix for people having the
knowledge to check out /var/log/daemon.log and comment eth0 out of
/etc/network/interfaces. However, if non-technical users are affected
by this problem, they are likely to get completely lost when their
wifi connection works for a few seconds after startup, then
mysteriously stops working for (apparently) no reason.

Jose David