Ubuntu 17.10 To Fully Use Netplan By Default For Network Configuration

[Delgarde]

Wow, you know you could just read about it before bitching. The document explaining it is almost as short as this article...

To be fair, the document *is* almost as short as the article... and just as lacking in useful information. I agree cloud is the most likely use case for something like this - but you'll notice that the main wiki page has absolutely nothing to say about that subject. There's a small amount of info on how it works and how to use it, but nothing about what the purpose is, or why you'd use this meta-config layer instead of just maintaining NetworkManager or systemd-networkd scripts directly...

[dp_alvarez]

Can someone help me understand the relationship between this, networkmanager and networkd? More interested in networkmanager vs networkd since netplan will probably be restricted to ubuntu only for a while.
Mainly, why does networkd exist, what can it do that wouldn't be better done by extending networkmanager? My little search suggests that it allows for setting systemd units for network devices and better integrate various network events and whatnot with the rest of systemd, but I don't understand why that couldn't be done with nm.
I'm not even that against systemd or anything, but it does bother me a little that something that should very clearly be managed by it's own service being integrated with a core system component.

[Luke]

Oh no, not more Canonical python crap. Please, golang at the very least or it doesn't exist. It's enough to make one seriously consider Debian again.

Update: I do apologise, according to the src/ netplan is written in C. I saw "python" mentioned somewhere and went ballistic. And why? Because if something as fundamental as network setup depends on python then ALL of ubuntu-minimal would depend on python so therefor removing python (which I do on all of my servers) would also remove the entire OS making ubuntu-server unusable.

https://git.launchpad.net/netplan/tree/src

Update2: The "oh no" sentiment remains, I didn't look carefully enough, the main netplan app is indeed freaking python!!! That means it will no longer be possible to remove python from ubuntu servers without uninstalling the entire OS if netplan | ifupdown are not virtual packages.

https://git.launchpad.net/netplan/tree/src/netplan

Python ought to be called "turtle" for its speed. Back in 2014 I tried the mintmenu/matemenu applet for MATE and found that pycompiling the applet's menu (with a big list of installed apps) on each new session pegged a netbook's CPU for well over a minute and blocked other uses of the machine. That's for a menu. Python is probably just fine for adding GUI features to a total amount of code you might otherwise do in shell scripts,etc but is no competitor to code that is compiled once and then run as needed for speed. Even JS is reported to be about 20x faster due to the intensive effort by web developers to speed it up.

No idea if netplan involves a long enough codepath in that main app to create problems using python or not. It its just a half-second delay in popping up a configuration GUI on an old machine without pegging the CPU that's no big deal. If it acts like matemenu with a long list of apps on a netbook, that's another matter.

[Hi-Angel]

Can someone help me understand the relationship between this, networkmanager and networkd? More interested in networkmanager vs networkd since netplan will probably be restricted to ubuntu only for a while.
Mainly, why does networkd exist, what can it do that wouldn't be better done by extending networkmanager? My little search suggests that it allows for setting systemd units for network devices and better integrate various network events and whatnot with the rest of systemd, but I don't understand why that couldn't be done with nm.
I'm not even that against systemd or anything, but it does bother me a little that something that should very clearly be managed by it's own service being integrated with a core system component.

(10:07:04)

Hi-Angel: networkd vs networkmanager? What's the difference?
(10:09:07) twb: Hi-Angel: one's part of systemd, the other isn't
(10:09:32) twb: Hi-Angel: NM has a bunch more functionality
(10:12:04) Hi-Angel: Alright, then why didn't systemd integrate NM in some way. There's a bunch of fronteds to NM besides the functionality, so I doubt that networkd could replace it, at least not anytime soon. And when functionality catch up, there would be a user resistance…
(10:12:04) Hi-Angel: Overall I just don't get, what's the point in networkd? There has to be some point.
(10:14:21) Hi-Angel: If I correctly understand, nowadays there's an obsolete way of network configuration via /etc/network/interfaces, and the modern via NM. And now there appears networkd.
(10:40:56) grawity: NM is a modern way to configure network, but it's not /the/ modern way
(10:41:19) grawity: also, it is relatively massive -- not something you could easily put in an initramfs or a container
(10:41:56) grawity: (speaking of massive, apparently 256-64 MB is not enough to run systemd without troubles: "Failed to reload daemon: Refusing to reload, not enough space available on /run/systemd. Currently, 15.5M are free, but a safety buffer of 16.0M is enforced.")

That's it. Apparently someone didn't like the size of NM.

That said, I cursory looked at the intro https://coreos.com/blog/intro-to-systemd-networkd.html and I feel like the whole point of networkd was just because someone paid for this, not because people need it. So feel free to ignore it.

[dp_alvarez]

That's it. Apparently someone didn't like the size of NM.

That said, I cursory looked at the intro https://coreos.com/blog/intro-to-systemd-networkd.html and I feel like the whole point of networkd was just because someone paid for this, not because people need it. So feel free to ignore it.

Thanks, I was really hoping for some amazing examples on how it could magically make a lot of things simpler but oh well. That first paragraph in the link definitively was something I did not expect, REALLY lowered my opinion on systemd. Integrating a useless module in a core system component on pretty much every distro just because someone paid for it, woah.

To be fair systemd modernized a long obsolete init system and it does work very well but fuck, things like that make it clear there are some serious design issues with the project...

[cynical]

To be fair, the document *is* almost as short as the article... and just as lacking in useful information. I agree cloud is the most likely use case for something like this - but you'll notice that the main wiki page has absolutely nothing to say about that subject. There's a small amount of info on how it works and how to use it, but nothing about what the purpose is, or why you'd use this meta-config layer instead of just maintaining NetworkManager or systemd-networkd scripts directly...

I'm not really interested in this stuff because I'm just a user, so I'm not looking in depth into it, but it's pretty obvious that since it requires configuration, it's not meant for end users. To bitch about how it might overwrite user configs doesn't make any sense if you take even the smallest bit of time to read about it.

[ZacWolf]

According to the netplan wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Netplan it is possible to disable netplan...

While setting up a new router, I somehow ended up with IFUPDOWN installed. According to the 17.10 docs, it doesn't come preinstalled, so at some point I must have installed it (though I don't remember doing so). I was using the older /etc/network/interfaces[IFUPDOWN] way to configure my router [as that's the method covered in just about every single HOW-TO I found], but that was causing a conflict for my "built-in" ethernet port (I added a additional 2 port pcie card after install).

For some reason that I still don't understand, the DHCP client used by IFUPDOWN would request one address, but then the dhcp client used by NETPLAN (via systemd-network) would make a second dhcp request and my ISP would hand it a different IP address.

So I "fixed" this by removing my "built-in" ethernet information from
/etc/netplan/01-netcfg.yaml # This file describes the network interfaces available on your system # For more information, see netplan(5). network: version: 2 renderer: networkd ethernets: ${WAN}: dhcp4: yes modifying it to read: # This file describes the network interfaces available on your system # For more information, see netplan(5). network: version: 2 renderer: networkd ethernets: This at least prevented netplan from duplicating what IFUPDOWN was doing.

I outlined all the steps that I took to disable netplan at:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/977211/ifconfig-not-updating-with-new-dhcp-provided-address/977506