Systemd, 10 years later: a historical and technical retrospective (2020)

Re:Systemd, 10 years later: a historical and technical retro... by sophacles on Tuesday August 06, 2024 @05:38PM (#41175662)

> 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).

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Re:Systemd, 10 years later: a historical and technical retro... by creshal on Tuesday August 06, 2024 @05:44PM (#41175715)

Now 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.

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Re:Systemd, 10 years later: a historical and technical retro... by ChocolateGod on Tuesday August 06, 2024 @06:06PM (#41175911)

NetworkManager 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.

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Re:Systemd, 10 years later: a historical and technical retro... by sophacles on Tuesday August 06, 2024 @06:02PM (#41175872)

I 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.

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Re:Systemd, 10 years later: a historical and technical retro... by creshal on Wednesday August 07, 2024 @02:30AM (#41178755)

A 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.

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Re:Systemd, 10 years later: a historical and technical retro... by gsich on Tuesday August 06, 2024 @05:53PM (#41175798)

systemd-networkd also has the big advantage in using the same config for all distributions. No weird Debian or Redhat config pain.

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Re:Systemd, 10 years later: a historical and technical retro... by pantalaimon on Tuesday August 06, 2024 @06:02PM (#41175873)

And that’s why Canonical came up with Netplan because otherwise things would get boring.

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Re:Systemd, 10 years later: a historical and technical retro... by jandrese on Tuesday August 06, 2024 @11:17PM (#41177930)

Yes, 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.

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Re:Systemd, 10 years later: a historical and technical retro... by rlpb on Tuesday August 06, 2024 @05:59PM (#41175845)

I'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.

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Re:Systemd, 10 years later: a historical and technical retro... by gsich on Tuesday August 06, 2024 @07:19PM (#41176564)

Also true.

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