Pasta can't bind ports on boot

[cj-wong]

Hello,

I have not been able to figure out how to get pasta to bind ports of containers on boot. Because I can just restart the container a short time later and it works, I assume pasta is not ready to bind ports when it does.

My setup:

• amd64 computer
• Debian 13, podman version 5.4.2
• containers run in quadlets
• pasta networking

Relevant error messages:

Failed to bind port <redacted> (Cannot assign requested address) for option '-t <redacted>'
Error: pasta failed with exit code 1:
Failed to bind port <redacted> (Cannot assign requested address) for option '-t <redacted>'
<redacted>.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=126/n/a

What can I do to address this? Should I be adding a wait period before starting? I did not have this issue when I was on Debian 12, podman version 4.3.1 (when the default network was slirp4netns), but I understand that it's because slirp4netns is slower than pasta, to the point that it can bind ports "on time", so to speak.

[Luap99]

yes you need to wait until your interface that you link to bindto becomes online.

It is a quite common issues that the user session starts before the network is ready. If you use quadlet there should already be a dependency on podman-user-wait-network-online.service which polls the systems network-online.target for readiness. But that also is problemeatic when the system unit is never activated, i.e. #24796

[cj-wong]

It seems for my system that the workaround in there doesn't work. network-online.target also appears to be active when I check. I suppose I would have to just add a dummy service, which my containers would then depend on, that waits before exiting.