systemd unfrak project
======================

unfraks systemd network configuration at boot time, on Fedora. Many
services, like privoxy, innd, etc..., bind to specific IP addresses when
they start up. They will fail to come up if their IP address is not
configured yet.

Unfortunately, making sure that all IP addresses get configured, before
those services get started, seems to be an impossible task. The
NetworkManager-wait-online service is diligently enabled. Multiple bug
reports, to make sure all services' systemd service config files have
a proper dependency on the network-online target, are resolved.

Still, it just doesn't look like it work reliably all the time. My
reboots get occasionally raked up because the IP addresses aren't set
up yet when privoxy, and other service start.

It might seem like things go sideways in NetworkManager, and not systemd.
A very good argument is that as long as systemd kick off
NetworkManager-wait-online, then waits for it to finish before starting
everything that depends on network-online.target. This is a reasonable
argument, but, still, the overall design of the whole process gets
dictated by systemd, with NetworkManager trying to fit into the mold.
Furthermore, NetworkManager is now tightly coupled to systemd. It doesn't
really matter, I only want my servers to boot correctly. That's not too
much to ask, but looks like it's necessary to explicitly unfrak it, to
make sure of that.

Anyway, the systemd unfrak project attempts to make network configuration
reliably available at boot time by having another service that
network-online.target depends on. The service kicks off a one-shot script
called "unfrak-systemd-network". The script waits a maximum of 30 seconds,
polling once a second until all IP addresses it expects to see can be bound,
and immediately terminates when they are. This is not a novel concept.
It's rumored that introducing explicit boot delays, in order for get a
reliable network environment, is a common fix. This script should keep
the boot delay to an absolute minimum.

Instructions:

1. Make sure that "systemctl enable NetworkManager-wait-online" was done.
Or perhaps systemd-networkd-wait-online instead of NetworkManager-wait-online
(if your systemd-networkd is similarly fraked).

2. You need to have autoconf, automake, and rpm-build packages installed
   (in addition to git).

3. Execute the following sequence of commands:

git clone https://github.com/svarshavchik/unfrak-systemd-network.git
cd unfrak-systemd-network
aclocal
automake --foreign --add-missing
autoconf
./configure
make dist

4. This will build an unfrak-systemd-network-<VERSION>.tar.gz file, then:

rpmbuild -ta unfrak-systemd-network-<VERSION>.tar.gz

5. This creates an installable RPM file. You can ignore the .src.rpm,
and install the main one, and activate it:

rpm -i $HOME/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/unfrak-systemd-network-<VERSION>-1.noarch.rpm

systemctl daemon-reload

systemctl enable unfrak-systemd-network

6. After making sure that unfrak-systemd-network is enabled, edit
/etc/sysconfig/unfrak-systemd-network. Add your system's static IP addresses
to the IP_ADDR setting. Optionally put your E-mail address into the REPORT_TO
setting if there's a mail server running on this server, and it is
operational by this point during the system boot (most are), and you would
like to be notified every time the boot was successfully unfraked.

7. This is going to install the "unfrak-systemd-network" script and execute
it during system boot, to hopefully fix things up.

Important: test the script by manually running:

systemctl start unfrak-systemd-network

Then as soon as this returns run "systemctl status unfrak-systemd-network",
and the "ps" command, for good measure, to verify that the script is NOT
running. If it's running it means that there's a typo in IP_ADDR, and the
script is waiting for the typo-ed IP addresses to become available.

You should see something like this, from the output of the
"systemctl status unfrak-systemd-network" command:

Dec 16 22:20:27 octopus.email-scan.com systemd[1]: Starting Unfrak systemd netwo
Dec 16 22:20:28 octopus.email-scan.com systemd[1]: Started Unfrak systemd networ

The script should not take more than a few seconds to run.

8. Congratulation, your boot should be now unfraked, going forward.