ifup/down broken!!!

David Henderson dhenderson at digital-pipe.com
Sat Sep 24 17:41:59 UTC 2016


Good afternoon all!  This is to let those that are attempting to work
with the busybox applets 'ifup' and 'ifdown' that their current status
is broken in certain conditions and to let them know the unfortunate
work around you must go through to make it work.

Testing has shown that there are two conditions that must be meet in
order for an 'ifup -a' call during boot to process correctly:

1) you must have a pre-existing /etc/network/interfaces file
2) each adapter must have static network config information (e.g. no dhcp)

If those two conditions are true, then everything works as designed.
Any alterations causes the applets to choke from an apparent issue
writing to the /var/run/ifstate file.  The only solution I can see is
that the burden of manually maintaining the /var/run/ifstate file is
on the user/interface.  Denys has recently said not to use 'ifup -a'
during boot, but has not offered any other solution unfortunately.
Incidentally, trying to bring up particular interfaces (e.g. ifup
eth0) does not work either.  Perhaps busybox requires additional
software for these commands to work properly - ifplugd?  Can anyone
confirm?

Additionally there is another issue using 'ifdown' with virtual
adapters bringing down the main interface that has been corrected by
Martin Townsend in another post so make sure that has been added or
that the version your using has that patch (should be > 1.24.x I
think).

Dave


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