Subject: bug#66306: Too many services depend on ‘networking’

From: Efraim Flashner <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2023 10:12:39 +0300

On Mon, Oct 02, 2023 at 02:24:49PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> I believe too many services depend on ‘networking’ for no good reason.
> There’s a good discussion of the problem at:
> 
>   https://systemd.io/NETWORK_ONLINE/

This exactly! How much 'network' counts as 'good enough' to start the
next services?

> For example, bitlbee, ntpd, hurd-vm, and avahi-daemon all depend on
> ‘networking’.
> 
> Is it always justified?  For example, avahi-daemon unconditionally
> listens on 0.0.0.0 and [::], so there’s no need to depend on
> ‘networking’.
> 
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> $ sudo netstat -tupla |grep avahi
> udp        0      0 0.0.0.0:mdns            0.0.0.0:*                           650/avahi-daemon: r 
> udp6       0      0 [::]:mdns               [::]:*                              650/avahi-daemon: r 
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
> 
> In other cases, such as bitlbee, it’s not as obvious because users can
> specify different addresses to listen to, and those might depend on
> ‘networking’ to set up the corresponding interfaces.
> 
> Thoughts?  Should we do an audit of these?

Probably should do an audit. For bitlbee, I guess the question is how
does it respond to changes in networking? If it comes up when only
loopback is up will it need to be restarted once an actual network shows
up?

For ntpd, I've had trouble with openntpd coming up while only loopback
was active and then I'd have to restart it for it to get the initial big
jump when starting.

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Efraim Flashner   <[email-masked]>   רנשלפ םירפא
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