Ubuntu 11.10 Waiting up to 60 more seconds for network configuration…

Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot was released last week, and has brought a few issues with it. One distressing new feature I found was that when booting it would hang for around a minute with the message ‘Waiting for network configuration…’ and then hang again with the message ‘Waiting up to 60 more seconds for network configuration…’.

I have found the cause of this is having any interfaces defined in /etc/network/interfaces ( besides lo ) defined as auto. To correct this problem, the recommended solution is to remove your interfaces from this file, and set them up with network manager. Leaving /etc/network/interfaces looking like the default:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

In my case, my network needs a bridge to operate, and since network manager does not allow to configure bridges, it MUST be defined in this file.

So, the only other solution must be to edit ‘Waiting for network configuration…’ script. This script is actually located here: /etc/init/failsafe.conf

Around 25 lines down in the file you will see a section:

# Plymouth errors should not stop the script because we *must* reach
    # the end of this script to avoid letting the system spin forever
    # waiting on it to start.
        $PLYMOUTH message --text="Waiting for network configuration..." || :
        sleep 40

        $PLYMOUTH message --text="Waiting up to 60 more seconds for network configuration..." || :
        sleep 59
        $PLYMOUTH message --text="Booting system without full network configuration..." || :

To solve the problem, you can just remove the calls to sleep, by commenting the out ( or at least reduce the wait time if your network really does need to wait )

# Plymouth errors should not stop the script because we *must* reach
    # the end of this script to avoid letting the system spin forever
    # waiting on it to start.
        $PLYMOUTH message --text="Waiting for network configuration..." || :
        #sleep 40

        $PLYMOUTH message --text="Waiting up to 60 more seconds for network configuration..." || :
        #sleep 59
        $PLYMOUTH message --text="Booting system without full network configuration..." || :