Debian strange behavior about network config
 

Ok, I am an experimented Debian users, using it since 1 years full time, so no "n00b" question here.

Here's the case : yesterday, I updated my whole Debby box using SSH... soon, the connection crashed. I was unable to reach the box by any ways so I thought "What the hell, it crashed?". So I rebooted the damn thing.
It wasn't crashed, in fact I find later when I moved from my desk to go take a look at the box that Eth0 was using the old useless ip 195.164.92.54. That's is really strange since this is an ip I was using loong loong ago, something like 1 years ago and that have been changed to... ehh... I'll say 192.168.0.1.
So I looked deeper and I found that the file /etc/interfaces have been changed by Debian during the update. My "good" files still exists and was renamed "interfaces.1".
This is very strange, since 195.164.92.54 wasn't used for a while and was removed from any config file, it is just like Debian saved somewhere the network first configuration (the one that have been done during the installation), not a in a common config files, and then used this configuration during the update.
I am not very sure what package caused this old config to wake up, but in updated package are dpkg and dpkg-dev, that are both very suspicious to me :)

This is not as big trouble, however I don't want to see this box offline each time I update it. If someone could tell me what caused that and why, I'll be verr pleased ;)

Did you add the new IP (192.168.0.1) using ifconfig at some point, or did you add the settings to for new IP (192.168.0.1) to /etc/network/interfaces?

If you just added it with ifconfig its not going to save the settings. If durring the update it had the restart networking it would have went back to whatever was in /etc/network/interfaces and not what was in memory from the ifconfig commands.

One year doesn't mean you're an experimented user even if you use it all the time. I've been using only linux/Unix systems only for 4/5 years and it doesn't make me an experimented compared to a 10 years unix man even if i really have few problems to hassle with.

if you have installed something like etherconf or netenv(something like that to select the network configuration), it can modify the interfaces file.And if you don't customize it after another apt-get dist-upgrade it can be modified again. This is the only situation that already happened to me and cross my mind.

i assume you were apt-getting/install/dist-upgrade a little bit before it arrived in your ssh session.

As I said I know how to use/manage Linux, of course settings were in /etc/network/interfaces since a long time. The box rebooted some time and everything was fine. There's no such ifconfig error.


mrcheeks, I haven't installed any of these apps willing, but maybe this come with default debian installation. I like to configure my system by hand instead of by script, so... However, if these package came with default Debian, well...
The trouble, still, is that I am scared to see this happen again. I have done a massive search (grep -R ... ...) on the system to find what package might have done this and where was his configuration, but I find nothing yet. Is it possible that such script have no config file, I mean that the old "dangerous" ip is saved somewhere in a binary file I can't modify?