Running Systems

In the past I hacked around a problem with the order of starting (and with several bugs) a network stack combined of network bonding (teaming) + VLAN tagging, and then with network bridging (aka – Xen bridges). This kind of setup is very useful for introducing VLAN networks to guest VMs. This works well on Xen (community, Server), however, on RHEL/Centos 5 versions, the startup scripts (ifup and ifup-eth) are buggy, and do not handle this operation correctly. It means that, depending on the update release you use, results might vary from “everything works” to “I get bridges without VLANs” to “I get VLANs without bridges”.

I have hacked a solution in the past, modifying /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-eth and fixing some bugs in it, however, both maintaining the fix on every release of ‘initscripts’ package has proven, well, not to happen…

So, instead, I present you with a smarter solution, better adept to updates supplied from time to time by RedHat or Centos, using predefined ‘hooks’ in the ifup scripts.

Create the file /sbin/ifup-pre-local with the following contents:

#!/bin/bash
# $1 is the config file
# $2 is not interesting
# We will start the vlan bonding before any bridge

DIR=/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts

[ -z "$1" ] && exit 0
. $1

if [ "${DEVICE%%[0-9]*}" == "xenbr" ]
then
    for device in $(LANG=C egrep -l "^[[:space:]]*BRIDGE="?${DEVICE}"?" /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-*) ; do
        /sbin/ifup $device
    done
fi

You can download this scrpit. Don’t forget to change it to be executable. It will call ifup for any parent device of xenbr* device called at. If the parent device is already up, no harm is done. If the parent device is not up, it will be brought up, and then the xenbr device can start normally.