Do I have to reboot when configuring a network interface?

[adrianmoya]

Hi all, I have a Proxmox 1.4 cluster with about 14 servers running (most of them are production environments). I recently had to reconfigure the second network interface to change the ip (we never used that nic but we are now planning on using it for backups).

I setup the ip under System->Network->vmbr1, and I got a message of
Attention: Network configuration changed. Please reboot to activate changes.

Of course, it's very VERY complicated for me to boot the system. There are a lot of services running in the cluster. Is there a way to apply those changes without rebooting?

Thanks...

 

[udo]

Hi,
if you know what you do, you can all done online. But this is not recomended, because, if you make a mistake (typo) in the config and reboot month later - you perhaps don't know exactly what you doing some times before...

ip, ifconfig and brctl are the linux-commands which you should know...

Udo

 

[adrianmoya]

Thanks for a rapid response. Let me see if I'm understanding this well:
If I log via web to a node of the cluster, and make changes there, I will only reboot that node (therefore the VMs running there will be affected). This is a viable solution as I can use one of the nodes to test first (the one with the less VMs) and then make this changes in each node progressively.

To remove the message inviting to boot in the master node, can I safely remove the /etc/network/interfaces.new file? I wish to undo the changes but I changed them back to the original settings and the message persists.

 

[typo3usa]

I would love to move to have these commands placed into the system vs doing a reboot.
So you can test them in real time.

Another crazy option - call me nutzoid but would be to have the system forward you to the new login page under the new IP - & if you do not respond say within 2 minutes or so - it would reset the IP range back to the old - all w/o reboot.

I cannot tell you the number of times we have fixed simple ip issues for a client via console

 

[adrianmoya]

Just for the records: removed the /etc/network/interfaces.new file and the interface doesn't show the message, I'm back to the start.

I'll do changes manually from console and try to restart the network, I hope that proxmox understands what's going on.