Re: periodic network disconnects (reason 'ip-config-unavailable')

[Chuck Anderson <cra WPI EDU>]

On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 11:07:51AM -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Sat, 2013-04-27 at 13:56 -0400, Chuck Anderson wrote:
> > On Fedora 18, I'm seeing periodic network disconnects with these
> > messages in the log:
> >
> > Apr 27 11:01:11 a NetworkManager[833]: <info> (wlan0): device state change: activated -> failed (reason 
> > 'ip-config-unavailable') [100 120 5]
> > Apr 27 11:01:11 a NetworkManager[833]: <warn> Activation (wlan0) failed for connection 'Sanctuary 2.4GHz'
> > Apr 27 11:01:11 a NetworkManager[833]: <info> (wlan0): device state change: failed -> disconnected 
> > (reason 'none') [120 30 0]
> > Apr 27 11:01:11 a NetworkManager[833]: <info> (wlan0): deactivating device (reason 'none') [0]
> > Apr 27 11:01:11 a dbus-daemon[736]: dbus[736]: [system] Activating service 
> > name='org.freedesktop.nm_dispatcher' (using servicehelper)
> >
> > What does reason 'ip-config-unavailable' mean and how can I
> > troubleshoot what is happening here?
> >
> > I do have IPv6 on this network and found this bug report, but that
> > appears to be for an older version and should be fixed in the version
> > in Fedora 18, NetworkManager-0.9.8.1-1.git20130327.fc18.x86_64:
>
> What are the messages just before that?  Is it IPv6 that's timing out?
> There should be some log messages about that.  You can also run NM with
> verbose IPv6 logging which might tell us more about what's going on.  So
> for now I'll suspect IPv6, and the issues there are that the router may
> not send advertisements quickly enough to prevent timed-out DNS servers.
>
> sudo dbus-send --system --print-reply
> --dest=org.freedesktop.NetworkManager /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager
> org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.SetLogging string:"debug" string:""
>
> grab the syslog output from that during a failure, then we'll see what
> the actual issue is and how to deal with it.

This was caused by my router's radvd configuration being non-RFC
compliant.  I was troubleshooting my Android device's IPv6
connectivity so I had temporarily lowered the AdvDefaultLifetime,
AdvValidLifetime and AdvPreferredLifetime on radvd.conf.
Unfortunately, radvd lets you set these values to ones that violate
contraints required by RFC4861 (MUST be higher than the
MaxRtrAdvInterval).

After fixing radvd.conf, NetworkManager is now behaving correctly.