[systemd-devel] networkd failing sporadically failing to bring up network device

[Richard Maw]

On Sat, Apr 04, 2015 at 12:08:04PM +0100, Sitsofe Wheeler wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've noticed that networkd occasionally fails to bring up one of two
> network interfaces on boot (this happens about once every 70 or so
> boots). The machine in question is a VMware ESXi 5.5 guest with two
> VMXNET3 network adaptors. When this issue occurs the message
> 
> rtnl: received address for a nonexistent link (1), ignoring
> 
> is present in the journal.
> 
> Does anyone know if this is a known issue in systemd 216 (I'm using
> Fedora 21)? I've attached a journal log below:

There's been a few post-217 changes related to parsing messages in rtnl,
one of which was related to accidentally interpreting change notifications
as responses under rare circumstances, so there are some known bugs in
216, but I haven't encountered yours before.

Re-testing with the latest systemd snapshot would let us know if it's
one of the bugs fixed post 217.

If it comes to debugging what netlink is doing, one option is to
use the nlmon interface, capture it with tcpdump as described in
http://seclists.org/tcpdump/2014/q4/32 and then use wireshark to parse
the dump.