I’ve been using /etc/network/interfaces to automatically bring up a Grid Connect PCAN-USB adapter when my computer boots up (or when the adapter is hotplugged). It was working perfectly fine in Ubuntu 13.04 and 13.10.
When I upgraded from Ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04, my previous method of adding the CAN adapter to /etc/network/interfaces caused Ubuntu to take forever to boot with a “Waiting for network configuration…” message (and completely broke all of my network interfaces including both ethernet and CAN). It turns out my previous method was bad because I was using the “inet” address family instead of the “can” address family. See “man 5 interfaces” for details on this address family. I found a much better way to make it work. Here’s my new entry in /etc/network/interfaces:
allow-hotplug can0 iface can0 can static bitrate 250000 up /sbin/ip link set $IFACE down up /sbin/ip link set $IFACE up txqueuelen 1000 type can bitrate 250000 sample-point 0.7 triple-sampling off restart-ms 500
Make sure that the three indented lines are indented using tabs. Spaces will cause the file to parse incorrectly, but I had to use spaces to make it format correctly on this blog. (BTW, I believe ifupdown is not supposed to be picky about spaces and tabs, but Network Manager is picky about it). I checked and supposedly even 12.04’s ifupdown has this CAN address family supported, so it should probably work in 12.04 (however, it’s untested by me).
I like to set a custom txqueuelen and restart-ms, neither of which seem to be supported in /etc/network/interfaces, so I added a couple of /sbin/ip commands to do it manually. I first have to bring the interface down, then set the rest of the custom options and bring it back up in the process. These commands seem to be executed after the interface has already been brought up, so that’s why I have to bring it back down. The ip command complains if I try to set options on the interface while it’s already up.
The first indented line that says “bitrate 250000” is required. Even though I end up setting the bit rate again in my manual ip command, the first line has to be there or ifup will complain. You can also set the sample point and triple sampling options with lines that say “triple off” and “samplepoint 0.7”, but since I’m specifying them in the manual command anyway, I figured it would be a waste to repeat them.
Hope this helps someone trying to get their CAN adapter to automatically go up. It’s really quite simple, but I couldn’t find any correct examples online.
Update 8/21/2014: I changed these instructions slightly to use “allow-hotplug can0” instead of “auto can0”. This ensures that it works correctly if the USB CAN adapter is not plugged in when the computer starts up. With “auto can0” you may see a long “Waiting for network configuration…” delay if you boot the system with the adapter unplugged.
