Random loss of network connectivity.

I can confirm on breezy. Happens on boot. Connection is lost, can only be
regained by run dhclient. However, the IP addy is not dropped. Happened twice
and then didn't reappear. Very odd. Will confirm tomorrow.

I have tried dhclient and had no luck with regaining the connection. By the way
I am using a Dell Latitude with a Pentium 3 from 2000, the stock eth0 adaptor
and a D-link DWL-650+ wireless card.

I've had one of those days where I've been switching from wired/wireless all
day. This problem seems to have showed up. I think it's an error in the
derootifing of dhcp3-client cause I had 8 instances of dhclient3 running before
I killed 7 of them :-P. A quick look at syslog says this:

May 29 15:32:48 darkelf dhclient: Can't create /var/run/dhclient.ra0.pid:
Permission denied
May 29 15:45:01 darkelf dhclient: Can't create /var/run/dhclient.eth0.pid:
Permission denied
May 29 16:29:35 darkelf dhclient: Can't create /var/run/dhclient.eth0.pid:
Permission denied
May 29 19:18:22 darkelf dhclient: Can't create /var/run/dhclient.ra0.pid:
Permission denied
May 29 20:17:36 darkelf dhclient: Can't create /var/run/dhclient.eth0.pid:
Permission denied
May 29 23:24:16 darkelf dhclient: Can't create /var/run/dhclient.ra0.pid:
Permission denied

IIRC the one who crashes stuff fixes them, so I assign this one to pitti ;-).

Odd, that worked fine a few weeks ago, but I can reproduce it here now.

 dhcp3 (3.0.1-2ubuntu7) breezy; urgency=low
 .
   * debian/patches/deroot-client.patch:
     - Always write the PID file before dropping privileges. (Ubuntu #10803)
   * Added debian/patches/dhclient-running_stale_pids.patch:
     - Always check for an already existing PID file, not only in release mode.
     - Remove the PID also if the previous process does not exist any more
       (stale PID file).
     - Added some log_info() statements.
     - This should now make it really hard to get multiple clients for the same
       interface at the same time. (related to Debian #178885)

This should be fixed with above version. Please complain loudly and reopen if
you still have problems.

Guess what? The pid in the pidfile isn't correct. This implies all pidfiles
count as stalled ones and previous processes don't exit.

nafallo@darkelf:~ $ cat /var/run/dhclient.ra0.pid && ps ax | grep dh
6430
 6451 ? Ss 0:00 dhclient3 -pf /var/run/dhclient.ra0.pid -lf
/var/run/dhclient.ra0.leases ra0

Now I understand this better. Seems we get a new pid when we daemonize. When
we've gone that far we are already de-root-ified. What about /var/run/dhcp/
owned by dhcp:dhcp? ;-)

 dhcp3 (3.0.1-2ubuntu8) breezy; urgency=low
 .
   * debian/patches/deroot-client.patch:
     - Always open the PID file before dropping privileges since we cannot do
       this afterwards. Separated out open_client_pid_file() from
       write_client_pidfile().
     - Revert the patch that moved write_client_pidfile() calls.
     - Ubuntu bug #17094.

*Sigh* finally... brown paperbag for this one, sorry for the mess.