Re: waiting for ppp0 to become free (Re: ppp0 out of control)

["Aurélien GÉRÔME" <ag@roxor.be>]

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On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 10:44:22AM +0100, Janos Farkas wrote:
> On 2005-01-21 at 15:44:44, Aurélien GÉRÔME wrote:
> > I am running 2.6.10 from kernel.org on Debian Sid ppc/x86, the same
> > issue occurs with 2.6.9. Though, 2.6.8.1 and previous are fine.
> > 
> > When my ISP connection via PPPoE (kernel side) goes down, reconnection
> > does not occur, and the kernel displays continuous:
> > 
> > kernel: unregister_netdevice: waiting for ppp0 to become free. Usage count = 1
> 
> BTW, I have seen many cases when this symptom annoyed me too, the last
> one is that my shutdown scripts tried unloading the network driver
> modules.  Is your setup doing this by any chance?  In my case,
> apparently there were conntrack entries keeping the device in use,
> which is almost useless when preparing to shutdown :)

Actually, it happens after my ISP's LCP echos are not coming anymore,
and then when pppd try to reconnect.

> OTOH, I couldn't find a way to flush those conntracks, so I worked
> around it by not rmmoding ethernet drivers.

I have conntrack modules loaded too. I will try removing 8139too
(on x86) and sungem (on ppc) if the issue occurs again. By the way,
I also have IPv6 loaded, since I use a dual-stacked connection with
native IPv6. How lucky I am! :)

> In your case, it's probably conntrack too, I'd presume you are using
> that PPPoE machine as a masquerading gateway, which by definition needs
> connection tracking...  I'm not sure either if this is a "real" change,
> I only vaguely recollect as some moons earlier this wasn't a problem in
> 2.6.

Yep, 2.6.8.1 works fine, this issue appears on 2.6.9 and 2.6.10. I
switched to a Debian 2.6.10 kernel for security reasons, and
the issue has not come yet. I had a glance at the changelog and
saw some network related patches. This is the -as patchset, see
<http://kerneltrap.org/node/4545> about it.

Cheers.

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