Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 114715
Hard Links Created Backwards
Last modified: 2007-04-18 13:02:25 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225 Description of problem: When creating a profile or switching between profiles, the files are deleted from the profile directories and replaced with hard links to the running system configuration files. Because all profile files link to the running system configuration files, changes to one profile are immediately reflected in the current configuration and in all other profiles created. When the profile files are created by hand (by copying and editing the files directly) and the profile is switched, the same effect occurs. The problem appears to be in NCProfileList.py. The source and destination files seem to be reversed with 'devfilename' being the source and 'profilename' being the destination (as defined in NC_functions.py). This problem is easily duplicated. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): redhat-config-network-1.2.15-1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Create a new profile with the GUI configuration utility 2. Select the new profile (if not already selected) 3. Change a setting in the new profile 4. Save the settings 5. Examine the inodes of the files under /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/* 6. The files in both profiles are linked to the same inodes Actual Results: Effectively the configuration in one profile is lost when changes are made to the other profile or when a new profile is selected because the files are deleted and set to reference the same configuration. Expected Results: The files under each profile should have unique inodes and the running system configuration files should be linked (hard or soft) to the current running profile. Switching profiles shouldn't clobber the second profile's settings. Additional info: This problem may be reproduced on Red Hat 9 with redhat-config-network-1.2.15-1 and on Fedora Core 1 with redhat-config-network-1.3.10. I am not cross-posting this bug and hope it doesn't get passed by because someone thinks it is just a problem with Red Hat 9 which is reaching "end of life".
how to use profiles: http://people.redhat.com/harald/redhat-config-network/help/network-profiles.html this may be considered a design bug, which makes it non-intuitive...
You're right - it is a design bug because if a profile is automatically an exact copy of another profile (and by extension, the default profile) then it compeltely negates the purpose of having profiles to begin with. The document "Working with profiles" says you can have an Away profile that always starts up the ppp interface and an Office profile that always starts up the eth0 interface but that only the default profile is activated at boot time. Here's the problem with that: [...]/profiles/default/ifcfg-eth0 -> ../../network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 [...]/profiles/Away/ifcfg-eth0 -> ../../network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 [...]/profiles/Office/ifcfg-eth0 -> ../../network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 No matter what, the default profile is activated at boot time because really there is only ONE profile. On the other hand, if the links were created like this: (Inode 123 for example) [...]/network-scripts/eth0 -> ../../profiles/default/ifcfg-eth0 (Inode 456) /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/Away/ifcfg-eth0 (Inode 789) /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/Office/ifcfg-eth0 Then: (1) The selected profile would always be the bootable default (2) Each profile could be unique (not sharing inodes w/default) (3) The program would match the documentation you referenced Aliases, yes, I understand. If a laptop user doesn't have root access, they need a simple way to swap configurations. There isn't any confusion about that and that isn't what this is related to. BTW, I already use aliases - basically the same as root doing: # ifdown eth-home # ifup eth-office If the hard links were corrected, one could select "Home" (with root access of course) before leaving the office and when getting home voila! It's in the right configuration (and vice-versa). Please note, only the /etc/sysconfig/networking-scripts files are linked incorrectly. Please observe the following outputs of 'ls -i': 1255798 /etc/hosts 1255798 /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/default/hosts 213504 /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/Testing/hosts 1255799 /etc/resolv.conf 1255799 /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/default/resolv.conf 213503 /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/Testing/resolv.conf 440741 /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/default/ifcfg-eth0 440741 /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/Testing/ifcfg-eth0 440741 /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 As you see, the /etc/ files are linked to the active profile. On the other hand, the /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/<profile>/ files ended up being cross-linked. Definitely a bug. This is quite simple to reproduce - I "saved" the default profile, created a new profile called "Testing", then I saved the new profile and selected the default profile again and saved again. Definitely non-intuitive as well.