GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 595361
Interface does not always get address from DHCP when plugging network cable after DHCP server failure is fixed
Last modified: 2009-09-18 17:09:16 UTC
My network gateway was down for a couple of hours and did not provide DHCP. NM tried to renew the lease for a while, and set the interface to 'deactivated' state when it did not get an address. Because this was a headless home server, I tried unplugging and plugging in the network cable, expecting it to detect this and renew the lease when DHCP was working again, but it did not: because it was headless and I did not have keyboard available, I had to reboot from power button to get network back. According to logs, network-manager did see the interface UP/DOWN events correctly. I later tried unplugging the cord and NM does correctly renew DHCP after plugging the cable in, so in normal case (no DHCP timeouts or deactivation) it works as expected. I would expect a interface marked as 'deactivated' by NM should be activated automatically again if it's a DHCP interface and the network cable is reconnected: this does not seem to happen. This is a ubuntu 9.04 machine, with 0.7.1 NM.
And to clarify, there is a switch between the machine and gateway, so this machine does see a UP network interface all the time, even if the gw is down.
Yeah; invalid connections don't get cleared for wired devices on cable plug/unplug, which should really happen; that's getting fixed soon for 0.8 and we may be able to backport to 0.7.x. Also, we should be retrying failed DHCP connections periodically which is also work-in-progress. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 511581 ***