On 02/27/2015 11:17 PM, Isaac Dunham wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 06:13:24PM +0000, KatolaZ wrote:
>> On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 01:56:56PM +0000, Matthew Melton wrote:
>>
>> [cut]
>>
>>>>
>>>> Just to support my point, Debian has a great logo, but this is what is
>>>> currently happening to the users of Jessie, thanks to the
>>>> systemd-nonsense:
>>>>
>>>> https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2015/02/msg00013.html
>>>
>>> Think they have found a solution after reading the followups. Reminds me that someone complained they couldn't terminate fdisk if started by systemd during boot.
>>> Might offer to help them...once I have stopped laughing of course. Ha ha.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Well, I still find it hard to believe that a modern Unix OS might be
>> stuck at boot because I forgot to connect an ethernet cable... This is
>> the essence of the systemd-nonsense. In that case it was "just" a
>
> What baffles me is that Lennart *has* written a daemon specifically to
> *avoid* hung boots due to networks being down.
> It's called ifplugd.
>
> (And yes, if I used my ethernet port more often than the twice a year
> I now use it, I might want to use ifplugd. Unlike systemd, it's a
> single small daemon that just checks interface state and runs a script
> if it's connected.)
>
> Or, that might be the way Debian sets up networking as a dependency of
> remote-fs which is a dependency of the late-boot programs in /usr.
> I used to encounter similar problems when I had no wireless; fortunately,
> sysvinit proceeds after a timeout.
>
First, I assume that if you do not use your wired NIC, you are using
802.11 rather than 802.3; some of us prefer the security and speed of a
wired network. I wired my house for 1Gbit years ago. The actual
bandwidth utilization for 802.3 is better than 802.11 and it is more secure.

As to the daemon.
Even with a BSD style parallel IPL, it is easy to modify the start up
scripts with either a spinlock or even better a parallel monitor that
check the state of the chip set on the NIC and restarts it if a certain
time passes. If you prefer not to do this (I do not), then you can do
what I did. That is, I built a post init (IPL) system. I placed it in
/etc/local.init.d. A script in /etc/cron.d activates a sequence of
checks using the @reboot command for the cron task time. Think of this
as a modern equivalent to /etc/init.d/rclocal.