[NCLUG] 11.04 with lvm encryption

Bob Proulx bob at proulx.com
Tue May 17 14:02:01 MDT 2011


Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> Bob Proulx wrote:
> > Is this using network-manager, wicd, ifupdown, or other?
> 
> This is using the installer.  So the installer is what is controlling the
> network.

Ah...  I was confused thinking we were talking about upgrades.  But
looking I see you did say install and I missed reading it.  I haven't
had any problems during install but I am using a local mirror most of
the time.  But during an upgrade with apt-get when network-manager is
upgraded NM tends to drop the network.  That is really an unacceptable
evil and has generated a lot of complaints!  What's worse is that NM
will actually rewrite the configuration files to rip control away from
ifupdown and take over from it.  I consider that even worse.

On Debian the debian-installer uses ifupdown to control the network.
At least that is the way it was on Lenny and I am pretty sure is still
true on Squeeze.  So it is a little strange that it starts out using
ifupdown to control the network during installation and then installs
network-manager and then hands control off at the reboot to n-m.
There have been cases where networking will work on install but then
not in the live system, and the reverse, depending upon the particular
issue being tickled.  Mostly it works okay though.  Personally I have
never had a problem during initial install and subsequent handoff.

But I have personally experienced network-manager dropping the network
during the upgrade however.  I have to get onto the machine console
and manually pick up the install with 'dpkg --configure -a' and so
forth.  When that is a local machine is one thing but a racked server
you have to drive to is completely another thing.

And personally I have been very frustrated with using network-manager
on my laptop.  I am sure it must work acceptably well for some people
though.  By comparison 'wicd' works very reliably.

These types of problems have put me firmly in the network-manager is
bad camp.  It is now a kill-on-sight package for me.

> > network available.  Sometimes the download will fail due to a flakey
> > mirror in the round-robin IP rotation, or for some other reason, so
> 
> Rarely a problem for me, I specifically select mirrors.tummy.com, partly
> because I know it's fast, mostly because it's even faster at my house
> because I have a transparent caching proxy on that IP.

Nice!  It's good to be you.  :-)

Bob



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