Seshan Ravikumar

aka. Seshpenguin

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title: Why My Website Went Offline (Blame systemd? Ubuntu? Linux?) author: Seshan Ravikumar type: post date: 2019-08-10T23:58:09+00:00 url: /2019/08/10/why-my-website-went-offline-blame-systemd-ubuntu-linux/ classic-editor-remember:

Hey Guys! You may have noticed that my website has been offline for a few days now. Well, good news, it’s back! (duh.)

Now admittedly the multi-day downtime was mostly down to my laziness… but we can ignore that for now… (I kinda put off looking at why the website went off)

So what went wrong? Well, after a small brownout, the PowerMac G5 (as expected) restarted. The problem? The network interface wasn’t being brought up.

As it turns out, there seems to be a bug with networking.service (or atleast, whatever service it calls) on Ubuntu 16.04 where it’s for some reason unable to automatically detect the network interface name.

I remedied this way back when I initially install Ubuntu by manually adding the interface name into “cat /etc/network/interfaces” (you can find the name from “ip addr”):

# The primary network interface
    auto enP48240p4s15f0
    iface enP48240p4s15f0 inet dhcp

This worked pretty well up until now: when systemd/udev decided that this time we boot, the interface name should be different. So much for “Predictable Network Interface Names”…

Now this obviously isn’t a wide spread issues, and I’m not totally surprised that this relativity obscure system (a PowerPC machine with it’s GEM ethernet) has some issues. In any case, if you have a PowerMac, keep an eye out for network interface name changes!