NetworkManager 1.0 Released After Ten Years Development

An anonymous reader writes: After ten years of development focused on improving and simplifying Linux networking, NetworkManager 1.0 was released. NetworkManager 1.0 brings many features including an increasingly modernized client library, improved command-line support, a lightweight internal DHCP client, better Bluetooth support, VPN enhancements, WWAN IPv6 support, and other features.

Comments

NetworkManager

[NotInHere]

One of the few unix command line tools whose command begins with a major letter.

Re:NetworkManager

[kthreadd]

Modern NetworkManager releases also include a handy tool called nmtui which is basically the GUI implemented in curses. Nmcli can sometimes be a bit unintuitive so it's a good thing to have around.

Re:NetworkManager

[Eric Green]

Yes, NetworkManager should be fine on most servers. Unless you want to use network bonding. And VLANs. And bridges. Nevermind bridged VLAN's (yes, those are a thing) on top of 802.3Ad bonds. And ... and... well, 90% of the other functionality that is offered by the Linux networking stack. NetworkManager works fine for managing the 10% of the network stack that is used 90% of the time. For the other 10% of the time, it is an abortion that should be taken out back of the barn and shot like a rabid dog. And this other 10% that NetworkManager won't do is 99% of why people pay me big bucks to make Linux do what they need it to do, since you will not get high performance networking out of a server using the limited functionality provided by NetworkManager. As in, the servers I work with generally have at least half a dozen gigabit NICs and two 10Gbit NIC's. NetworkManager won't get me 1/10th of what I need to put these servers into the midst of a large network for use in server consolidation, and is utterly useless once we start talking about Open vSwitch and other such SDN components.

So sure, if you're a sandwich shop putting a $500 server under the cash register, or you are a teenage college student setting up a video sharing network for your bro's in the flop house you board in, NetworkManager will work fine for you. For those of us doing anything more complex, it is a useless abomination and the first thing done when bringing up a new server image is "chkconfig NetworkManager off ; service NetworkManager stop". (Or the AbominationD equivalents thereof).

Re:NetworkManager

[WoodstockJeff]

"With RHEL based sysysstems, at least, the simplest way to block it is to put "NM_CONTROLLED=no" in the "/etc/sysconfig/network. That helps ensure it stays disabled, until, and unless you specifically select it for any network port.."

If NM is installed, even telling it to not control a network interface is insufficient to keep it from interfering with that interface. Just a week ago, I installed a new NIC in a server, configured it manually with NM told to leave it alone. 12 hours later, the server disappeared from the network. It didn't crash, it just disconnected, because NM decided to take over control of the NIC.

Why? Because I had not put the MAC address into the configuration. Seems NM will ignore NM_CONTROLLED=no if you don't tell it the MAC address. So my fixed-IP server suddenly became a dynamic-IP workstation, with DNS pointing to the wrong network and a different gateway.

So, no, I'm not going to leave NM installed on any machine that is NOT moving around the country using WiFi.

mask NM

[Anonymous Coward]

The most important feature is that it can be disabled, masked and unistalled without loosing functionality, as oppposed to other new TM things that I can't get rid of that easily