[CentOS] disable/mask NetworkManager leads to unit startup fails

James Hogarth james.hogarth at gmail.com
Mon Jan 16 18:37:06 UTC 2017


On 16 January 2017 at 15:24, Oberdorfer Patrick
<patrick.oberdorfer at a1telekom.at> wrote:
> Hello!
>
>
>
> For me it was best practice to disable "NetworkManager" on headless
> installations.
>
> Now suddenly I ran into an problem with several programs not starting
> correctly upon boot anymore.
>
> The problem seems to be that their unit files contain "After=network.target"
> but network.target wont wait till network is up and working, just waits for
> some low level network stuff.
>
>
>
> Now I read that it would be good practice to edit this and use
> "After=network-online.target" instead. But I don't want to touch several
> systemd unit files shipped via rpm packages.
>
>
>
> Software like unbound, postfix and so on which needs to bind to ip+port on
> startup fails on my systems now since I disabled NetworkManager.
>
>
>
> What solved the problem for me was to install "systemd-networkd" instead and
> enable it upon boot.
>
> It's system unit file pulls in "network.target" as "Wants" this way software
> that says "After=network.target" will start after network cards are
> configured. Why there is this behavior I haven't found out yet.
>
>
>
> Whats your best practice to archieve stable networking upon reboot? Do you
> use NetworkManager or systemd-networkd or maybe something exotic anyway?
>
>
>


Use NetworkManager ... it's the supported RH configuration tool.

This article is a little old (7.3 had a NM rebase and I've not
revisited it yet ... the prime gain in 7.3 though is arbitrary
layering of vlan/bridge/bond/etc negating the caveat at the end for
edge case).

https://www.hogarthuk.com/?q=node/8

As for the targets ... man systemd.special to get a better understanding:

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.special.html

By default services you install will listen on all interfaces, usually
a configuration with something like ListenAddress :: to indicate this
(there is an internal ipv6->ipv4 translation going on so you only
should listen on :: and not 0.0.0.0 as well) ... when a service binds
to a port on all addresses then the address does not need to exist yet
- the kernel just handles it.

If you configure your service to bind on a specific IP though then
they way the binding system call works it already needs to exist (by
default) which is why with the default configuration if the service
tries to start before the IPs are applied (quite likely given parallel
startup) you have a nice race condition and a fairly high likelihood
of failure.

There's two ways to handle this - and it depends on the service.

You can order it via after (and potential requires if you want no
attempt to start the service if the target fails to activate)
network-online.target (see referenced man page) which won't be
complete until at least one IP is on any interface.

If it's your own application and you can set the flags on the actual
bind then you can use so_freebind on the socket opened, some
applications may have this as a compile time or configurable option.

Another option is to enable net.ipv4.ip_nonlocal_bind and
net.ipv6.ip_nonlocal_bind which allows the kernel to bind a socket on
an IP it doesn't have (do note the caveat it may break some things).

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt

If it's a systemd socket being used by the service then you can enable
the freebind option via FreeBind=true

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.socket.html

Overall you may be interested in this:

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/NetworkTarget/

I really wouldn't use systemd-network on CentOS as a general thing as
it's basically undocumented/unsupported by Red Hat at this time, with
NM being their actual supported solution.

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/783533 <-- network Vs NetworkManager

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/876183 <-- no systemd alternative
for NM in EL7


Hope that helps and explains things!



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