[Techtalk] Basic connection questions

[vtrucs]

Wim De Smet wrote:
> FWIW, NetworkManager logs most of what it does to syslog (/var/log/syslog).
> So if you read the stuff that gets logged right after boot, you should be
> able to see if it is trying to manage your network interface or not.

I have been checking syslog, as well as daemon-log, messages and dmesg. 
Daemon-log merely repeats the dhcpdiscover efforts with no further 
information. Syslog repeats those too, but has this interesting message:
May 28 12:13:06 none NetworkManager: <info> Unmanaged Device found; 
state CONNECTED forced. (see http://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/191889)
as does dmesg when it first tries to bring up the connection.

However, the bug listed seems to have more to do with a browser always 
coming up off-line, which is not a problem for me. Also, the Network 
Manager icon show eth0, the wired connection, as "device not managed."

>  I assume you already configured it to run in unmanaged mode.
>
>   

The only way I know to do this is to list the device in 
/etc/network/interfaces. Listing/not listing it seems to be what toggles 
the managed/not managed message in the NM icon. NM's conf file has 
managed=false for the [ifupdown], that and keyfile are the only plugins 
listed under [main] and the no-auto-default is set to the mac address of 
the wired LAN card. H'mmm.
> To me it sounds like this is not an NM issue at all, but probably more of a
> DHCP configuration issue. For instance, some servers require you to release
> your previous lease if you do a fresh dhcprequest without releasing the
> previous one, even if the standard probably says they should just reissue it.
>   

> Wim
>
>
>   


I noticed that when I run ifdown on the device, it does do a DHCPRELEASE 
on an IP address, and if I run dhclient, a message that an alreadly 
running process ID had been killed. However, the problem still happens 
even with the release and PID kill. This is interesting, though - I had 
not tried to connect eht0 since logging in today, so it appears 
something else did.



MG