Mark as a fixit. 

sbasi, if the bug goes idle for too long, could you please find an owner later?

Issue 643272 has been merged into this issue.

This will break our team members' local moblab setups becuase we use a single port and use a network switch to connect to DUTs.

As soon as they update their moblab, it'll loose network connection.

This also means that other people can _loose network connection when they update_. That is a rather bad outcome of an update ;)

More to the point, this could adversely impact our ability to
keep moblab instances up and running in the test lab.  We don't
want to lose network access to a moblab instance just because
there's some bug with detecting the USB dongle.

This should move from "fixit" to "deal with it right away".

Per c#4, this needs triage and action.

Questions to your messages:
1) Prabhu, please note testing of Chrome OS DUTs via moblab only works through this ethernet dongle. This is because it serves DHCP to the DUTs and the devserver location is hardcoded in the shadow_config as the dongle's ethernet address (http://192.168.231.1) so they won't be able to do provision if not on this subnet.

2) Richard, the moblab DUTs are still ssh'able if this dongle does not come up. However testing/verify will fail as expected. Not having the dongle limits the ability for autotest services to launch not the ability for shill to be running.

Re #6: The big problem here is hidden in (2). Not having the ehternet dongle _is_ limiting shill's ability to run (since moblab-network-bridge-init.conf runs 'shill stop' but never restarts it on failure)

That means that moblab looses network connection to the external world.

by the way, all the guado_moblab DUTs in the lab have ethernet dongle attached?

I am going try to implement a strategy in moblab-network-bridge-init.conf to start shill on external interface first, and then block on usb-dongle for bridge initialization. In this way, the external connection will just work.

A better solution is to trigger bridge initialization when a dongle is plugged in. I am not sure if there is an easy way to do that.

Let me know if you have any concern.

The following revision refers to this bug:
  https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/overlays/board-overlays/+/f7f559287d577ec174d0de4d2155d731a814842e

commit f7f559287d577ec174d0de4d2155d731a814842e
Author: Michael Tang <ntang@google.com>
Date: Tue Dec 20 17:50:11 2016

Waiting for USB ethernet dongle without stopping the shill.

The upstart script moblab-network-bridge-init.conf will block 5 minutes
to wait for the USB ethnet dongle ready. We used to stop the shill
during the wait. This cause the Moblab to have no external interet
connection during the time. Also if the dongle is not configured, shill
is not restarted. We fix this by only stop the shill when USB dongle is
detected.

BUG= chromium:630034 
TEST=manual.

Change-Id: I72a3ffd99a3dadf06c6bb042a5a19b02645ecd5d
Reviewed-on: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/422534
Commit-Ready: Michael Tang <ntang@chromium.org>
Tested-by: Michael Tang <ntang@chromium.org>
Reviewed-by: Richard Barnette <jrbarnette@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Michael Tang <ntang@chromium.org>

[rename] https://crrev.com/f7f559287d577ec174d0de4d2155d731a814842e/project-moblab/chromeos-base/chromeos-bsp-moblab/chromeos-bsp-moblab-0.0.5-r47.ebuild
[modify] https://crrev.com/f7f559287d577ec174d0de4d2155d731a814842e/project-moblab/chromeos-base/chromeos-bsp-moblab/files/moblab-network-bridge-init.conf

The following revision refers to this bug:
  https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/overlays/board-overlays/+/6070f99d275072c37dd441388dd0d0e2044a12ac

commit 6070f99d275072c37dd441388dd0d0e2044a12ac
Author: Michael Tang <ntang@google.com>
Date: Tue Dec 20 17:50:11 2016

Waiting for USB ethernet dongle without stopping the shill.

The upstart script moblab-network-bridge-init.conf will block 5 minutes
to wait for the USB ethnet dongle ready. We used to stop the shill
during the wait. This cause the Moblab to have no external interet
connection during the time. Also if the dongle is not configured, shill
is not restarted. We fix this by only stop the shill when USB dongle is
detected.

BUG= chromium:630034 
TEST=manual.

Change-Id: I72a3ffd99a3dadf06c6bb042a5a19b02645ecd5d
Reviewed-on: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/422534
Commit-Ready: Michael Tang <ntang@chromium.org>
Tested-by: Michael Tang <ntang@chromium.org>
Reviewed-by: Richard Barnette <jrbarnette@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Michael Tang <ntang@chromium.org>
(cherry picked from commit f7f559287d577ec174d0de4d2155d731a814842e)
Reviewed-on: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/423353
Commit-Queue: Michael Tang <ntang@chromium.org>
Trybot-Ready: Michael Tang <ntang@chromium.org>

[rename] https://crrev.com/6070f99d275072c37dd441388dd0d0e2044a12ac/project-moblab/chromeos-base/chromeos-bsp-moblab/chromeos-bsp-moblab-0.0.5-r47.ebuild
[modify] https://crrev.com/6070f99d275072c37dd441388dd0d0e2044a12ac/project-moblab/chromeos-base/chromeos-bsp-moblab/files/moblab-network-bridge-init.conf

Michael can we close this?