Moving towards NetworkManager

Josef Wolf jw at raven.inka.de
Fri Jul 29 19:37:48 UTC 2016


On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 03:15:52PM +0200, Oliver Grawert wrote:
> well, i assume you can always force a re-generation by the tool, but by
> default you would use the networking tool config that your installation
> prefers ...

>From the description, I'd expect an abstraction layer which would regenerate
the config for the underlying system on every reboot. From that, I'd hope to
do my configuration to netplan (which, luckily, don't use INI) and netplan
would cope with the details of the underlying system.

> heh, sorry ... reflexes of an old ubuntu developer ... if someone says
> NIH i go into defensive mode and expect you refer to ubuntu development
> ... :)

I see. As a developer, I know EXACTLY what you mean :-)

> well, there seemingly are problems if you run linux on a virtual switch
> with dynamically generated interfaces or special servers which use bios
> names for devices or some such, i guess linux has grown into areas
> where it had not been used before, it might not affect your desktop or
> home server install but there might actually be usecases for it ...

I am pretty sure such problems exist. Although I've not yet seen them. Not in
the world of embedded systems, and not in networking.

The only situation I came close to the problem was with load-balancing with
multiple pppoe/ether lines.
But that was not a big deal. Just auto-generate some shell-scripts and throw
them into /etc/ppp/if-up.d and use this information to adjust traffic shaping,
policy routing and whatever. Have I ever mentioned my configuration system?

It was not easy, but it was solvable. But I have no idea how this is meant to
be done with the new system. After all, the ppp interfaces don't have
associated hardware.

Anyhow, whoever is going to face such problems would probably have
above-the-average expertise and be able to cope with the situation.

Just to sum up:
- I don't see the problem they want to solve
- I don't see the solution they offer.
- But I DO see the burden they throw onto the average user who is sitting in
  front of their box with a single interface and try to figure the interface
  name just to use ifup/ifconfig/tcpdump or whatever. I'd bet this are about
  99% of all installed systems.

Doesn't sound like a good deal to me.

> this is like bringing support for 1024 partitions to the kernel, 90% of
> linux users will never need such a feature, but it needs to be there
> for ... well.

That's entirely diferent. My first disk is still sda (I admit, it was hda
before) and the first partition on it is still sda1. I have not even noticed
that support for 1024 partitions was added. It did not break anything for the
average user.

-- 
Josef Wolf
jw at raven.inka.de




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