Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 149316
Server reboot causes Unregister-netdevice errors
Last modified: 2015-01-04 17:17:10 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041111 Firefox/1.0 Description of problem: We run FC3 servers as VPN servers. If the server is rebooted or shutdown whilst a virtual PPP interface is still present then the console repeatedly shows: Unregister-netdevice: waiting for ppp1 to become free. Usage count = 2 The 'count' may vary at each reboot. The system does not reboot/shutdown, so we have to do a power off and restart. NOTE: the kernel has a patch applied to it to support MPPE/MPPC for our VPN service. (Patch by Jan Dubiec can be found at: http://www.polbox.com/h/hs001/). We had this problem at FC2 but only ran that for a short time before upgrading to FC3 - hence it wasn't reported as an FC2 bug. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.6.10-1.766_FC3 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install FC3 with MPPE/MPPC patch. 2. Connect to server over vpn (using pptp client); this will cause a virtual PPP interface to be created. 3. Reboot server using 'reboot' command. Actual Results: Server gets tied up with console messages. Server doesn't reboot. Expected Results: Server should shutdown all network interfaces and then reboot. Additional info: This hasn't been 'tested' as such since our servers are live. However, we have had cause to reboot the servers recently and this problem has always occurred. (Yes, we do warn users that we will be rebooting but there is always someone who doesn't logout. Hence a ppp interface is usually still present at reboot time.)
An update has been released for Fedora Core 3 (kernel-2.6.12-1.1372_FC3) which may contain a fix for your problem. Please update to this new kernel, and report whether or not it fixes your problem. If you have updated to Fedora Core 4 since this bug was opened, and the problem still occurs with the latest updates for that release, please change the version field of this bug to 'fc4'. Thank you.
Okay I will try the new kernel. However, the servers have a modified kernel (for mppe/mppc) so it will take a little time. John.
Yes, the latest FC3 kernel (2.6.12-1.1372_FC3) fixes the problem. I rebooted the server and logged in as a vpn user (which creates a virtual ppp interface). Twice shutting down the server from the console worked fine, despite the ppp interface being present. I also rebooted the server remotely, with a ppp interface present, and it rebooted fine - no error messages and no looping. As far as I am concerned you can close this bug report.