Hi, I've got a newish X-series server running Etch that has a Broadcom NIC using the BNX2 driver, all set up statically in interfaces (and I've commented out the "allow-hotplug" line for that interface).
When the server boots, I see the NIC start to come online, but then other services begin loading while the card is still doing port negotiation, etc. This causes cascading failures with the next batch of services to come online (ISCSI, LVM, etc), leading to an unclean boot. Evidence for the fact that networking is backgrounding comes in startup lines like the following: "Starting Samba daemons:nmbdbnx2: eth0 NIC Link is Up, 100Mbps full duplex smbd. Starting OpenBSD Secure Shell server: sshdNET:Registered protocol family 10" What I really need is for the networking subsystem to block rather than background until the NIC is fully alive. I'd rather not resort to some "until ping" kind of kludge, or the kludge I've currently stubbed off with, where I do a "wait 60" on the next service that depends on a live NIC, but would prefer to simply have networking wait for full comms to be established before passing control on to the next service startup. Given how long it takes an X-Series just to boot out of BIOS, a few extra seconds waiting for networking to be established really doesn't matter - but ISCSI missing its mounts surely does! Cheers, Mike Ely
