unable to restart networking daemon

Question

When I type sudo service networking restart, I am getting error as shown below:

edward@computer:~$ sudo service networking restart
stop: Job failed while stopping
start: Job is already running: networking

Got this error when I wanted to restart networking after changing mac address and also after setting static IP in /etc/network/interfaces file.

I get same error even after reverting back those changes and when my computer works fine.

While looking through /var/log/syslog I found this:

kernel: [ 6448.036144] init: networking post-stop process (28701) 
                                                  terminated with status 100

is that relevant to the failed stop/start?

I am on Ubuntu 14.04

Solution

The error (post-stop) in your log seems related to this (in /etc/init/networking.conf line 25ff.):

post-stop script
    if [ -z "$UPSTART_STOP_EVENTS" ]; then
        echo "Stopping or restarting the networking job is not supported."
        echo "Use ifdown & ifup to reconfigure desired interface."
        exit 100
    fi

You get the exit code, but not the more informative message if you do sudo service networking restart.

There is a lot of detail in this bug report about the issue. It seems deprecated behaviour. /etc/init.d/networking stop doesn't work any more and on Debian Jessie sudo service networking stop doesn't have any effect either. You seem to have to run ifup/ifdown on the individual network interfaces now, so let's hope you don't have too many of them.

If using ifup/ifdown is unacceptable, this allows you to restore the 13.10 behaviour.

The final solution for it is: sudo service network-manager restart

Comments

[Admin]

@edwardtorvalds - did you reboot after making that MAC change? Ubuntu/Debian logs, /var/log/syslog or in dmesg.

[Admin]

@slm here is the link to my syslog file

[Admin]

@slm here is the link to my dmesg file

[Admin]

@edwardtorvalds I cleaned up my comments, the relevant result is now in the question. Maybe you can do the same for those that don't really help future readers of this Q.

[Anthon]

@edwardtorvalds I hope you get the MAC / static IP working now

[Edward Torvalds]

my MAC change/static IP were working fine already, like i said in question. but thanks for your interest :)

[Edward Torvalds]

I was unable to restart it by that command so I used GUI back then