Weirdness with Virtual Ethernet Interfaces on Ubuntu
Published on 2 Dec 2013 · Filed in Rant · 220 words (estimated 2 minutes to read)I’ve been doing some experimenting with virtual Ethernet (veth) interfaces in Ubuntu as part of the ongoing work with network namespaces, LXC, and related technologies. A few times I’ve run into a very weird situation, and I have yet to figure out exactly what’s happening. I thought I might share it here in the hopes that someone else has seen this behavior and knows a) what causes it, and b) how to fix it.
I’ll start with a pretty vanilla installation of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Open vSwitch (OVS). When I run ip link list, I get output that looks something like this (click the image for a larger version):
OK, nothing unusual or unexpected there.
Next, I’ll add a pair of veth interfaces:
ip link add vmveth0 type veth peer vmveth1
Then the output of ip link list looks like this (I’ve circled some of the output to draw your attention; again, you can click for a larger version):
See? The name of the veth peer interface gets garbled up and somehow corrupted. Because of this, nothing works—I can’t use the veth pair to connect network namespaces, or to connect a Linux bridge to OVS, or anything else. Rebooting the system does not fix the problem; only a rebuild seems to get rid of it.
Anyone have any ideas?