quotes in the ifcfg-<intrface> file

[WSU]

I had a perfectly fine working system that I was trying to get Swift on. I made some changes for swift/keystone/apache/certs, etc... and rebooted. Then I could not ssh to it from my desktop. I was able to ssh from another system on the same network. After much head banging and google searching, I compared the ifcfg file for the interface on this system with that of another system in my swift group. The only difference I saw was that the values in this non-ssh system were " ", and the values on the good system were not quoted. So, I removed the quotes and restarted network. Then I could ssh in. Another thing I tried and noticed during this troubleshooting was that when I started NetworkManager and tried running nmtui, it did not know about this interface to edit and crashed when I tried to add an interface.

Very strange that suddenly, the quoted values in the ifcfg-<intr> file were unreadable/unusable. The timestamp on the file had not changed, implying that the quotes had always been there.

Has anyone else seen this or know anything about quoted values in the network config files not working??? I saw no other error messages when I restarted network numerous times before removing the quotes. And 'systemctl status network' did not show anything alarming.

Problem is resolved, I'm just curious if anyone knows about this???

[gerald_clark]

Without seeing the before and after, it would be difficult to say.

[WSU]

gerald_clark - before/after what? I can put the " " around the values in my ifcfg-<intrface> file again, and show how nmtui crashes, or cat the file with/without quotes, or screenprint the ssh failure??? What I'm really wondering is if anyone is aware of some change that made the " " bad, or the config file unintelligible.

With this same problem I also experienced a change in my run-level setting so the boots were trying to start the system in GUI mode which caused the boot to hang. So I had to fix the run-level settings in rescue mode.

So, maybe there is some package out there that I inadvertently updated that has these 'features'???