openSUSE 11.2 M8 - smpppd broken for Ethernet connections?

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

Hi there,

I don’t know if this problem has been introduced with one of the last upgrades, so maybe the “M8” is not accurate.

Using ifup with user control via cinternet/qinternet/kinternet has always been my main method for configuring any kind of network interfaces (although always playing around with NetworkManager or WICD for testing purposes).

Today I noticed that I am no longer able to configure ethernet interfaces (presumably this will also apply to wireless interfaces) on my openSUSE 11.2 installations (in fact I have two ATM, i586 and x86_64, although both running in VBox, so I cannot Test my Wireless PCIe with that).

  • Yes, I am allowed to connect to smpppd

polkit-auth --explicit-detail 
org.opensuse.smpppd.connect
  Authorized:  Yes
  Scope:       Indefinitely
  Obtained:    Thu Sep  10 12:53:44 2009 by auth as root (uid 0)
  • Yes, the interface eth0 is configured to allow non-root users to control it via smpppd and one of the frontends
 grep USERCONTROL /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth0 
USERCONTROL='yes'
  • Yes, smpppd is up and running
 /usr/sbin/rcsmpppd status
Checking for SMPPPD:                                                                         running
ps aux|grep smpppd|grep -v grep
root      8793  0.3  0.1   5216  1232 ?        Ss   17:36   0:04 smpppd
  • No, there are no hints in the changelog except the one considering that PolicyKit is now used instead of group policies (dialout that was in older versions)
 rpm -q --changelog smpppd |head -n 25
* Do Aug 20 2009 aj(at)suse.de
- Use libiw-devel instead of wireless-tools in BuildRequires.

* Fr Nov 28 2008 lnussel(at)suse.de
- add support for netconfig to fix static configured DNS servers
  (bnc#449518)

* Fr Sep 19 2008 lnussel(at)suse.de
- also check explicit PolicyKit authorizations

* Di Sep 16 2008 lnussel(at)suse.de
- add support for IPv6

* Do Sep 11 2008 lnussel(at)suse.de
- use PolicyKit instead of dialout group to check access
- support plain chat instead of wvdial, making wvdial optional

* Fr Apr 25 2008 lnussel(at)suse.de
- use latest svn snapshot which includes all previous patches
- prevent endless autoreconnect (bnc#383744)
- support more connection states for wireless interfaces (bnc#383745)

* Mo Feb 04 2008 lnussel(at)suse.de
- let pppd decide which dummy IPs to use for DoD (bnc#345845)

Still, I don’t get any output when searching for manageable interfaces with cinternet, with the --verbose switch I only get:

 cinternet -I --verbose
trying to connect local smpppd

Even as root there is no output, so missing permissions can be excluded.

 su - -c "cinternet -I --verbose"
Passwort: 
trying to connect local smpppd

The really odd thing, the moment I configure a “dialin”-connection (let’s say DSL), the respective interface is shown.

 cinternet -I --verbose
trying to connect local smpppd
01 i dsl0
 su - -c "cinternet -I --verbose"
Passwort: 
trying to connect local smpppd
01 i dsl0

Can anybody try to reproduce this?

a) install smpppd

b) Switch to traditional method

c) configure your network interface ethX or wlanX with

[x] Enable Device Control for Non-root User Via KInternet

d) run the cinternet-command shown above

If this is a reproducible behavior (I can at least reproduce it on two installations) I will file a bug report.

#2

Thanks a lot all those masses of devoted testers for your great contributions in finding out if this bug is reproducible (especially on real hardware and fresh installs of M8/RC1).

Maybe it was my fault, giving you a simple and detailed testcase which would have taken not any more than two minutes of your precious time.

I apologize for that, looking at the other threads in this subforum, I should have seen, that you had much more important things to do in i.e. reporting lots of “bugs” related to third party software not supported and thereby not included in the software which really should have been tested.

So I filed a bug report on pure suspicion now.

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=547978

If your further contributions to that bug are also as outstanding as they were here and it really is a bug (= I don’t make a complete fool out of myself by posting a problem which can not be reproduced thereby wasting time of maintainers they could have spent on fixing real bugs), we can look forward to a major problem in the final version.

Sorry for trying to waste some of your precious time actually working for the community.

P.S.

And the few people (I think you know who you are) I don’t expect to contribute because they already contribute a lot, will most likely be (again) those few, who actually (now) might contribute here.

This is sad, but very likely also true …

#3

Fixed (bug introduced by changes in sysconfig-package).

Thanks to L.Nussel and S.Becker (for confirming the bug on real hardware and a fresh install of RC1 via PN).

No thanks to …(you also know who you are)