[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#611716: network-manager should retry DHCP configuration periodically after it fails

[Olivier Mehani]

Package: network-manager
Version: 0.8.1-6
Severity: important
Tags: upstream

When connected to a router with inbuilt switch, power-cycling the router bring
the Ethernet interface down and up again, thus triggering a reconfiguration.
When using DHCP, this include sending a query for an address to the router.
However, it may take some time for the router to be ready again, and the DHCP
requests essentially end nowhere. Network-manager is therefore unable to
configure the interface. However, it never retries to configure and use that
interface (regardless of the fact that IPv6 addresses may have been obtained
through SLAA) without human intervention, leaving the machine potentially
indefinitely offline.

Network-manager should try periodically to re-configure DHCP interfaces,
potentially with an exponential back-off. Additionally, it would be good if, in
the meantime, it configured link-local IPv4 addresses.

Not sure if it is an upstream issue, but I suspect as much as Ubuntu appears to
have the same problem.



-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'testing-proposed-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_AU.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages network-manager depends on:
ii  adduser                 3.112+nmu2       add and remove users and groups
ii  dbus                    1.2.24-4         simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  isc-dhcp-client         4.1.1-P1-15      ISC DHCP client
ii  libc6                   2.11.2-9         Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libdbus-1-3             1.2.24-4         simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2        0.88-2.1         simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libgcrypt11             1.4.5-2          LGPL Crypto library - runtime libr
ii  libglib2.0-0            2.24.2-1         The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgnutls26             2.8.6-1          the GNU TLS library - runtime libr
ii  libgudev-1.0-0          164-3            GObject-based wrapper library for 
ii  libnl1                  1.1-6            library for dealing with netlink s
ii  libnm-glib2             0.8.1-6          network management framework (GLib
ii  libnm-util1             0.8.1-6          network management framework (shar
ii  libpolkit-gobject-1-0   0.96-4           PolicyKit Authorization API
ii  libuuid1                2.17.2-5         Universally Unique ID library
ii  lsb-base                3.2-23.2squeeze1 Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip
ii  udev                    164-3            /dev/ and hotplug management daemo
ii  wpasupplicant           0.6.10-2.1       client support for WPA and WPA2 (I

Versions of packages network-manager recommends:
ii  dnsmas 2.55-2+b1                         A small caching DNS proxy and DHCP
ii  iptabl 1.4.8-3                           administration tools for packet fi
ii  modemm 0.4+git.20100624t180933.6e79d15-2 D-Bus service for managing modems
ii  policy 0.96-4                            framework for managing administrat
ii  ppp    2.4.5-4                           Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) - da

Versions of packages network-manager suggests:
pn  avahi-autoipd                 <none>     (no description available)

-- no debconf information