network-manager no longer starts automatically

Question

First post here I think

I have a 14.10 box that used to be a 14.04 box. It's a media centre.

When it was a 14.04 box it booted up fine. Now though it doesn't. When it boots it pauses on "Waiting for Network configuration" for about 3 minutes. Then when it finally come up it doesn't start any network interfaces.

sudo service network-manager start    

will get things going again but I can't keep doing it for life. Please help me to figure out how to get it to start automatically again.

I'm on the verge of reinstalling but in the interests of overcoming problems rather than just trying to avoid them I thought I'd ask here.

Some google results keeps pointing me to a problem with /etc/network/interfaces but I've even gone so far as removing this file and I still have no luck.

Hoping you folks can help. This is pretty frustrating.

Happy to post contents of whatever would help.

Solution

Your problem is that you have removed the file /etc/network/interfaces; you need this file.

The network configuration hangup at boot time is a common issue. To recreate the file, open a terminal and execute the following command:

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

Then, copy and paste the following into the file:

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).
#
# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

Press CTRL + o and then press ENTER to save the file. Press CTRL + x to exit the file.

Restart network-manager:

sudo service network-manager restart

Finally, to make it start up automatically execute the following command:

sudo update-rc.d network-manager defaults

Reboot to check your work.

Please post any errors or fail.

---

If that doesn't work, edit /etc/init/failsafe.conf:

sudo nano /etc/init/failsafe.conf

Look for "sleep" and change the number from 20 to 5 so that it looks like this:

sleep 5

Then comment out the following lines by placing a # at the beginning of each line so they look like this:

# $PLYMOUTH message --text="Waiting for network configuration..." || :
# sleep 40

# $PLYMOUTH message --text="Waiting up to 60 more seconds for network configuration..." || :
# sleep 59

This changes the wait time from 2 minutes to 5 seconds.

One last thing you can do is reinstall network-manager to replace any missing files:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall network-manager

Comments

[muru]

Do you have a file named /etc/init/network-manager.override?

[mchid]

have a look at this answer here askubuntu.com/a/249850/167115 you will have to change the ips to match yours accordingly but you should be able to get the right idea from here. I think by listing the ip gateway netmask etc here, it should start it up.

[kahlerisms]

@muru nope, no such file exists.

[kahlerisms]

@mchid I think I've ruled out any problem with interfaces - problem seems to exist regardless of the contents of that file (or if the file even exists)

[mchid]

@kahlerisms well here's at least a fix for the waiting for network problem, this changes the wait to 5 seconds instead of having to wait 2 minutes.

[kahlerisms]

Thanks for your help though unfortunately same problem after the network-manager reinstall. You're right I get to go and plug a keyboard in and start network-manager sooner, so that's a positive but it's still a poor workaround :(