[Bug 2109487] Re: netplan apply - cannot connect to system bus at boot time

[lethargos]

Unfortunately I cannot confirm it, because this provisioning is strictly
dependent on the open-vm-tools which run early in the boot process.

The problem is that I have no access to the virtual machine until I
manually connect the network interface, which in turn triggers the
network configuration (which is done through ova/vapp, so through open-
vm-tools, which passes the information to netplan, I guess) and cloud-
init finally runs, meaning I can log in through the user configured in
cloud-init. Which I cannot do beforehand cloud-init runs completely.

Actually, the VM doesn't seem to boot fully until I connect the network
card, that is to say, I don't get a login prompt. When I get the login
prompt, everything works just fine.

As I said, the practical consequence for me is only that the network
interface isn't automatically getting connected to the VM. And the
reason seems to be that open-vm-tools (i.e. toolsDeployPkg, the perl
script which is part of open-vm-tools, as far as I understand) identify
this netplan error and it exits unsuccessfully, which is turn means that
the network interface remains disconnected. But otherwise,  if the
network card were to connect automatically, I mostly wouldn't care. Of
course, that doesn't mean that there isn't an objective problem anyway.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2109487

Title:
  netplan apply - cannot connect to system bus at boot time

Status in cloud-images:
  New
Status in dbus package in Ubuntu:
  New
Status in netplan.io package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  I will reference this comment here from the beginning:

  https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-
  tools/issues/761#issuecomment-2834567855

  I use packer to provision virtual machines starting from ubuntu cloud
  images (ova templates) on vSphere.

  When using cloud image release-20240710 (1.0-2ubuntu1.2), I don't have
  any issues with netplan and everything is provisioned correctly.

  When switching to the latest cloud image version release-20250403
  (netplan 1.1.1-1~ubuntu24.04.1), "netplan apply" doesn't work
  correctly, ending up with the following error:

  "Failed to connect to system bus: No such file or directory and
  Falling back to a hard restart of systemd-networkd.service"

  This could be a regression caused by this backport
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/noble/+source/netplan.io/+bug/2077011,
  but I cannot be sure.

  In my case, the practical consequence is that the open-vm-tools
  scripts don't exit successfully and the network card is not
  automatically connected, as it should. This is somewhat less relevant
  for Canonical/netplan, but this is a scenario that a lot of people
  come across when dealing with provisioning Ubuntu virtual machines in
  vSphere using packer/terraform, so I'm just putting it out there.

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