Moving towards NetworkManager

Josef Wolf jw at raven.inka.de
Fri Jul 29 11:04:23 UTC 2016


On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 11:20:41AM +0200, Oliver Grawert wrote:
> just because it is such a funny coincident i thought i should point out 
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2016-July/039464.html
> 
> which tries to attack exactly the problems discussed in this thread...

Thanks for the pointer, Oli!

If I understand correctly, the installer would generate /etc/netplan/*.yaml
and netplan would generate whatever is needed when the system is booted.

Is this correct?

AFAICS, netplan seems to be in a VERY early stage, it doesn't even support
routing/DNS yet? Is it even functional?

Is this an official plan?

IIUC, so far we have:

- ifupdown:       Legacy. Configuation is scattered all over /etc/*
- NetworkManager: Closely tangled with desktops
- networkd:       Umm, have not checked it yet
- netplan:        An abstraction layer above the other three.

Personally, I'd very much prefer YAML above INI. INI is ill-defined and hard
to modify consistently in an automated (scripted) way. No comment on
ifupdown configuration... Please note: all this is IMHO!

Wouldn't it be a better plan to merge NM and networkd, give it a sane config
file format, and use THAT to replace ifupdown?

Given that there's probably no chance that NM and networkd would be merged,
introducing an abstraction layer seems to be a good plan B.

Somehow, I get the impression that everyone tries to roll his own
system. Smells a bit like NIH.

BTW: Some years ago, network interfaces used to be called ethXX or wlanXX or
ethXX.YY or something. Nowadays, they have really wired names. This
complicates automatic configuration a lot. Why am I forced to go through loops
to find out the names of the interfaces instead of simply using eth0/eth1/eth2?
How am I (as a human) supposed to remember those wired names if I want to
check and/or modify some settings on a network interface or want to run
tcpdump on it?

-- 
Josef Wolf
jw at raven.inka.de




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