[Virtual-pkg-base-maintainers] Bug#506454: Additional Data

[siggma]

First, a note on the kernel version under which I reported the bug. I 
compiled a copy of 2.6.26.8 using a vanilla kernel and matching debian 
.config from here http://merkel.debian.org/~jurij/ as a test for future 
custom kernel compiles but this issue occurs regardless of the kernel 
version. It seems to have begun when I moved the installation of the 
latest Debian 5.0 network installation CD and Kernel 2.6.25-2 to my 
production machine.

I normally boot the aptitude updated 2.6.26-1 on a daily basis.

History:
This is an installation I originally used for testing on an older PIII 
(coppermine) box. It installed fine and ran on the test box without any 
network issues at all. I then moved the entire hard drive to my faster 
(Pentium-d) server which has different NIC hardware, updated 
/etc/udev/rules.d/z25-persistent-net.rules and rebooted. The network 
came up fine but I noted errors initializing the "eth2" device. When I 
attempted to restart the error was persistent. Investigation led me to 
look at udev/rules.d more closely where I  discovered there was an 
additional 70-persistent-net.rules file. I removed the original 
z25-persistent-net.rules and the 70-persistent-net.rules allowing udev 
to recreate it's configuration from scratch and rebooted. I now have 
just one 70-persistent-net.rules as noted above and both interfaces work 
fine but I cannot reset eth2 and I still get the error so there seems to 
have been a change in persistent-net-generator.rules script after an 
update I made to the test box.

The test box was originally  installed from the CD labeled "Debian 
GNU/Linux testing "Lenny" - Official Snapshot i386 CD Binary-1 
20080825-11:06" (from .disk/info).  I ran apt-get upgrade and apt-get 
dist-upgrade before I moved the installation to the server.

After removing the *-persistent-net.rules and rebooting udev now 
contains only the following (no duplicate udev rules) for net devices. 
It's contents are listed in the original bug report.

moya:/etc/udev/rules.d# ls
50-udev.rules                     75-cd-aliases-generator.rules
60-persistent-input.rules         75-persistent-net-generator.rules
60-persistent-storage.rules       80-drivers.rules
60-persistent-storage-tape.rules  91-permissions.rules
60-persistent-v4l.rules           95-late.rules
70-persistent-cd.rules            z25_persistent-cd.rules
70-persistent-net.rules           z60_hdparm.rules
moya:/etc/udev/rules.d#

Clearly this could be an issue with network startup scripts, udev or 
something else. Hopefully this will help with tracking down this 
annoying issue.