4 ms·

Yeah but that doesn’t teach much about core components in real systems, such as systemd, the init process, how dependencies work etc. I’m not saying you won’t

Yeah but that doesn’t teach much about core components in real systems, such as systemd, the init process, how dependencies work etc. I’m not saying you won’t learn, but I learnt a heap by avoiding systemd using gentoo. I eventually gave in when it became clear that it was no longer a viable option for various reasons, but the knowledge I learnt was mostly relevant. That being said, every time I try and do something remotely advanced with network manager I fail. I can no longer have static ips, or customise DNS on a DHCP controlled connection without google

core-questions 6y ago
Yeah, the basic use case of simple wired network connectivity has gotten extremely complicated, especially in Ubuntu 18+, where you configure Netplan with YAML to render templates or...something.. that configures NetworkManager or not NetworkManager to do whatever to finally run `ip` to set the address. I miss just editing /etc/network/interfaces and /etc/resolv.conf by hand. I get that that sucks for laptops, but why can't the rest of us just have an exceedingly simple and pleasant setup?
- akersten 6y ago
  Ugh, this resonates with me so much. I recently tried to fix some kind of mundane network issue (had a Fedora machine configured for a static IP and wanted to use DHCP instead), and the absolute mess of tooling that is the Linux networking landscape baffled me. How could it get this bad? As far as I could tell, there were at least 4 competing ecosystems (NetworkManager, the 'ip' tool, /etc/network/interfaces, /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts) all extant at the same time. Does 'ip' tool update one of those files? How do I tell systemd to re-load the configuration? Is NetworkManager running or not? Does it matter? Does NM update these files, or do something magical to the interface? Are these even the right files? The best answer at which I could arrive is "who knows?" Every time I attempted to change the network interface settings, it only stuck around until the machine rebooted. Something was resetting it back to a static IP, and I had no tools to tell me what. Why did distro maintainers ever allow things to become this confusing? Why do we have so many tools and config files for the same thing? In the end I reinstalled a fresh copy of Fedora on the machine and set the DHCP configuration in the setup wizard. It's that bad. My experience tells me to anticipate a comment along the lines of "Hey, those programs and config files are all actually the same tool, and you must have just been configuring it wrong." If that's the case - it's an even stronger point that this chaos has reached a critical mass, where parts of the same networking configuration tool are so disjoint that they don't visibly interoperate at all.
  - throwaway8941 6y ago
    I'm almost positive your problems were caused by NetworkManager. I usually disable and blacklist it everywhere (or wipe entirely if the distribution dependency tree allows it), and my systems never behave in this unpredictable way. It tries to be helpful and rewrites network configuration files to align them with its own configuration.
  - ac29 6y ago
    /etc/network/interfaces & /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts aren't part of NetworkManager (the directories don't even exist on my machine). You should probably check out `systemctl list-units` to see what is actually enabled and running on your machine.
    - akersten 6y ago
      Thanks, that's a pretty nifty systemd command[1]. Sadly my confusion is only furthered, since I'm seeing both target files and daemons (although maybe they're both considered 'units' in systemd) and now a new name ("networkd") joins the fray. No sign of NetworkManager at least. What's also interesting is I've somehow managed to have the networkd-wait-online.service fail, despite having an internet connection. This is mostly a curiosity at this point, nothing's broken - but it is a really humbling experience to realize how little I know about the modern Linux network stack after "using" desktop Linux for a decade or so. [1]: https://imgur.com/a/VYX7lmu https://imgur.com/a/VYX7lmu
  - elFarto 6y ago
    The 'ip' command only operates on runtime state (it doesn't save anything to disk). NetworkManager used to be configured to save it's config to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts on Fedora, for backwards compatibility (see /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf). /etc/network/interfaces is the Debian alternative to network-scripts. I don't use Debian based distros much so I don't know too much about that. There's also systemd's networkd, which has it's own config in /etc/systemd/network. Honestly I'm surprised you've got a Fedora machine with networkd. Usually NetworkManager has been the goto choice (and is what my Fedora 32 install has, although this install has been upgraded from Fedora 23 so take that for what it's worth). Most of this mess comes from ifconfig (which again, only operated on runtime state), which people then wrote scripts around to automate the setup of the networks. Then ip came along to access networking features that ifconfig couldn't. You best off sticking to NetworkManager (in my opinion) for desktop usage. It has a far better GUI integration than networkd (which is fine for server/embedded use).
- throwaway8941 6y ago
  My current cross-distribution method of choice is systemd-networkd. It supports a lot of configuration options and can set up VPN tunnels (like WireGuard). https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd-networkd https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd-networkd Here's a sample config file from my home desktop using a static IP: $ cat /etc/systemd/network/lan.network [Match] Name=enp3s0 [Network] Address=192.168.100.200/24 Gateway=192.168.100.1 DNS=1.1.1.1 DNS=1.0.0.1 This'll work on any systemd distribution. netplan is one of those Canonical projects that'll probably disappear in a year or two.
  - addicted 6y ago
    Are there any Canonical projects, outside of Ubuntu itself, that dont just eventually fizzle out? I feel like after all these years, Canonical has still not figured out how to make Open Source work. Nearly everything they do leads to controversy, and them eventually accepting the community alternative with a huff.
    - a1o 6y ago
      I feel they do stuff in a whatever way, and that signals other developers on what matters, and leads to working on something to do that properly. Like, their solutions don't get used but if they are not done than no good solution comes up.
- nightfly 6y ago
  Try dropping netplan and using systemd-networkd.
- Anthony-G 6y ago
  I’ve always been surprised that RHEL/CentOS 7 doesn't have a simplified server-mode for installing a basic, headless system with a static IP address with an Ethernet connection. The default configuration and prescribed usage is to configure the networking with Network Manager - even though its added complexity is to solve the problems faced by portable computers using Wi-Fi. I’d wager the majority of RHEL/CentOS 7 installations are on static hosts (virtual or physical) rather than mobile devices.
- Spivak 6y ago
  I really don't understand the motivation for netplan existing. It's such a primitive tool that provides very little abstraction over it's backends that aren't pluggable or really configurable at all. It's super weird that they didn't just do the thing with NetworkManager since all they needed to write was a plugin a la ifcfg-rh to process turn YAML into NM settings and then you're done. And since they have NM as a backend they clearly are perfectly capable of doing this.

core-questions 6y ago

Yeah, the basic use case of simple wired network connectivity has gotten extremely complicated, especially in Ubuntu 18+, where you configure Netplan with YAML to render templates or...something.. that configures NetworkManager or not NetworkManager to do whatever to finally run `ip` to set the address. I miss just editing /etc/network/interfaces and /etc/resolv.conf by hand. I get that that sucks for laptops, but why can't the rest of us just have an exceedingly simple and pleasant setup?

akersten 6y ago
Ugh, this resonates with me so much. I recently tried to fix some kind of mundane network issue (had a Fedora machine configured for a static IP and wanted to use DHCP instead), and the absolute mess of tooling that is the Linux networking landscape baffled me. How could it get this bad? As far as I could tell, there were at least 4 competing ecosystems (NetworkManager, the 'ip' tool, /etc/network/interfaces, /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts) all extant at the same time. Does 'ip' tool update one of those files? How do I tell systemd to re-load the configuration? Is NetworkManager running or not? Does it matter? Does NM update these files, or do something magical to the interface? Are these even the right files? The best answer at which I could arrive is "who knows?" Every time I attempted to change the network interface settings, it only stuck around until the machine rebooted. Something was resetting it back to a static IP, and I had no tools to tell me what. Why did distro maintainers ever allow things to become this confusing? Why do we have so many tools and config files for the same thing? In the end I reinstalled a fresh copy of Fedora on the machine and set the DHCP configuration in the setup wizard. It's that bad. My experience tells me to anticipate a comment along the lines of "Hey, those programs and config files are all actually the same tool, and you must have just been configuring it wrong." If that's the case - it's an even stronger point that this chaos has reached a critical mass, where parts of the same networking configuration tool are so disjoint that they don't visibly interoperate at all.
- throwaway8941 6y ago
  I'm almost positive your problems were caused by NetworkManager. I usually disable and blacklist it everywhere (or wipe entirely if the distribution dependency tree allows it), and my systems never behave in this unpredictable way. It tries to be helpful and rewrites network configuration files to align them with its own configuration.
- ac29 6y ago
  /etc/network/interfaces & /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts aren't part of NetworkManager (the directories don't even exist on my machine). You should probably check out `systemctl list-units` to see what is actually enabled and running on your machine.
  - akersten 6y ago
    Thanks, that's a pretty nifty systemd command[1]. Sadly my confusion is only furthered, since I'm seeing both target files and daemons (although maybe they're both considered 'units' in systemd) and now a new name ("networkd") joins the fray. No sign of NetworkManager at least. What's also interesting is I've somehow managed to have the networkd-wait-online.service fail, despite having an internet connection. This is mostly a curiosity at this point, nothing's broken - but it is a really humbling experience to realize how little I know about the modern Linux network stack after "using" desktop Linux for a decade or so. [1]: https://imgur.com/a/VYX7lmu https://imgur.com/a/VYX7lmu
- elFarto 6y ago
  The 'ip' command only operates on runtime state (it doesn't save anything to disk). NetworkManager used to be configured to save it's config to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts on Fedora, for backwards compatibility (see /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf). /etc/network/interfaces is the Debian alternative to network-scripts. I don't use Debian based distros much so I don't know too much about that. There's also systemd's networkd, which has it's own config in /etc/systemd/network. Honestly I'm surprised you've got a Fedora machine with networkd. Usually NetworkManager has been the goto choice (and is what my Fedora 32 install has, although this install has been upgraded from Fedora 23 so take that for what it's worth). Most of this mess comes from ifconfig (which again, only operated on runtime state), which people then wrote scripts around to automate the setup of the networks. Then ip came along to access networking features that ifconfig couldn't. You best off sticking to NetworkManager (in my opinion) for desktop usage. It has a far better GUI integration than networkd (which is fine for server/embedded use).
throwaway8941 6y ago
My current cross-distribution method of choice is systemd-networkd. It supports a lot of configuration options and can set up VPN tunnels (like WireGuard). https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd-networkd https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd-networkd Here's a sample config file from my home desktop using a static IP: $ cat /etc/systemd/network/lan.network [Match] Name=enp3s0 [Network] Address=192.168.100.200/24 Gateway=192.168.100.1 DNS=1.1.1.1 DNS=1.0.0.1 This'll work on any systemd distribution. netplan is one of those Canonical projects that'll probably disappear in a year or two.
- addicted 6y ago
  Are there any Canonical projects, outside of Ubuntu itself, that dont just eventually fizzle out? I feel like after all these years, Canonical has still not figured out how to make Open Source work. Nearly everything they do leads to controversy, and them eventually accepting the community alternative with a huff.
  - a1o 6y ago
    I feel they do stuff in a whatever way, and that signals other developers on what matters, and leads to working on something to do that properly. Like, their solutions don't get used but if they are not done than no good solution comes up.
nightfly 6y ago
Try dropping netplan and using systemd-networkd.
Anthony-G 6y ago
I’ve always been surprised that RHEL/CentOS 7 doesn't have a simplified server-mode for installing a basic, headless system with a static IP address with an Ethernet connection. The default configuration and prescribed usage is to configure the networking with Network Manager - even though its added complexity is to solve the problems faced by portable computers using Wi-Fi. I’d wager the majority of RHEL/CentOS 7 installations are on static hosts (virtual or physical) rather than mobile devices.
Spivak 6y ago
I really don't understand the motivation for netplan existing. It's such a primitive tool that provides very little abstraction over it's backends that aren't pluggable or really configurable at all. It's super weird that they didn't just do the thing with NetworkManager since all they needed to write was a plugin a la ifcfg-rh to process turn YAML into NM settings and then you're done. And since they have NM as a backend they clearly are perfectly capable of doing this.