I am working with a 4-port NIC and I want to turn off all interfaces but one. I don't know if it is a problem or not, but when I turn off the third and the fourth interfaces with the ifdown command, the next return message is shown in the terminal: RTNETLINK answers: No such process. Nonetheless, when I turn it on (ifup) and off (ifdown) again, the message is not shown. I've searched over Google and the closest I have found related to my problem is this link, but it didn't solved any of my doubts.
I just want to know what could be the cause or causes of this message when issuing the ifdown command, and why the message didn't appeared the second time.
Here I paste the /etc/network/interfaces file in case it is helpful:
# interfaces(5) file used by ifup(8) and ifdown(8)
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto nf0
iface nf0 inet static address 192.168.100.200 netmask 255.255.255.0
auto nf1
iface nf1 inet static address 192.168.101.201 netmask 255.255.255.0
auto nf2
iface nf2 inet static address 192.168.102.202 netmask 255.255.255.0
auto nf3
iface nf3 inet static address 192.168.103.203 netmask 255.255.255.0
iface nf0 inet6 manual
iface nf1 inet6 manual
iface nf2 inet6 manual
iface nf3 inet6 manualThanks in advance for any help you can provide.
1 Answer
This message generally indicates that you try to remove a route from a routing table, but such a route does not exist in the table.
When bringing the interface down, ifdown is trying to remove any routes that are associated with a given interface. This message appears when ifdown "thinks" it has to remove a route (because it appears somewhere in the configuration) but the route does not actually exist in the routing table (for example it has been already removed manually). This can happen if you changed the network configuration files for these interfaces while the interfaces were up and eg. added a route to the configuration that wasn't there at the moment the interface was brought up (may be also eg. a change of the netmask, so the netmask when the interface was brought up is different from the current one).
After ifup, the route - if any is configured - is added while the interface is brought up, and after subsequent ifdown it is removed. So if there were no configuration changes between ifup and ifdown, no message appears.
