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> As someone who experiments with weird networking stuff from time to time I've been kicked in the nuts by NetworkManager on several occasions. nit: NetworkMa
by sophacles 2y ago
> As someone who experiments with weird networking stuff from time to time I've been kicked in the nuts by NetworkManager on several occasions.
nit: NetworkManager is not the one provided by systemd in the first place - that's systemd-networkd.
That aside I do wierd networking stuff for a living and here's how I see the available tooling:
* NetworkManager - great for a laptop where you're moving between networks and don't need anything too fancy.
* systemd-networkd - great for servers and other mostly static networking setups, even weird ones.
* If you're doing anything weird dynamically (e.g. experimenting) - disable the above or move the interfaces you are experimenting on to a fresh netns and do everything by hand with the ip command (and maybe udchpc or dhclient if you need a dhcp client, but be aware of how to write your own callback scripts for how to handle various associated events).
- creshal 2y agoNow for the weird part: Redhat wrote both NM and sd-nd, and decided what servers really need is NM by default, and getting a server to actually use sd-nd is like pulling teeth on RHEL. Completely baffling.
- ChocolateGod 2y agoNetworkManager can read old style sysconfig network configuration, which is still used to this very day even if Red Hat wishes you wouldn't, and you really shouldn't.
- sophacles 2y agoI don't know why Redhat would do that, but I've never used RHEL - I quit the redhat and derivatives in the 90's due to rpm hell, and never looked back.
- creshal 2y agoA new job forced me to get intimately familiar with how fractally dysfunctional RHEL and derivatives still are, and the only thing more baffling than Redhat's self-sabotaging decision making process is why anyone would voluntarily use it. I hope we can finish the Debian migration soon.
- gsich 2y agosystemd-networkd also has the big advantage in using the same config for all distributions. No weird Debian or Redhat config pain.
- rlpb 2y agoI'm not keen on the network config being scattered across a dozen tiny files. It makes it hard to see what's going on, or to spot a configuration error.
- gsich 2y agoAlso true.
- pantalaimon 2y agoAnd that’s why Canonical came up with Netplan because otherwise things would get boring.
- jandrese 2y agoYes, but then NetworkManger will override Netplan sometimes but not others. There is a setting in one of the buried config files to configure this behavior, but it doesn't always work depending on how NetworkManager is feeling that day.