On 04/08/2017 10:48 PM, Steven Haigh wrote:
> On 09/04/17 12:59, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>> In case it's unclear I am *not* happy with NetworkManager for servers
>> or stable environments. Laptops that have to wander from environment
>> to environment need multiple VPN's, yeah, OK, I can see having a more
>> complex tool. But for a  VM? Or a server?
> 
> Yep - I've gone as far as removing NetworkManager completely from my
> servers.
> 
> A few months ago I drank the koolaid and set up nmcli with my Xen server
> - and it was a pain in the backside. Finally got it working, but it
> still decided to drop the bridging interfaces randomly (causing all VMs
> to disconnect from the network) and wouldn't bring them back up.
> 
> I ended up reverting to manually creating ifcfg-* config files and
> scrapping all plans of migrating to anything NetworkManager.
> 
> The down side is that you lose the network-online target for systemd -
> which can cause its own problems - but its worth working around those
> for a stable network config.
> 

At a conference in 2015, I attended a couple of presentations by RH
employees. On one day, a RH employee gave a talk I attended. In the
Question time at the end, he made a tangent comment about how
NetworkManager should never be disabled because RH was focused on making
it an enterprise reliable networking tool. The VERY NEXT DAY he gave a
talk regarding OpenStack & Kubernetes, and I kid you not, one of the
first comments was "disable NetworkManager" and use the old networking
tools!

I right then called him out on it. He handled it very well. :-)

The short, he reiterated that RH is committed to NetworkManager first as
a enterprise reliable networking tool. He admitted there were
shortcomings and that there were known issues where it didn't work well
(virtual networks with OpenStack for example), but that he fully
expected many of the kinks to be worked out "soon". He hoped and was
expectant that NetworkManager would be a full replacement before EL7
stopped getting feature updates. He made the disclosure that he can't
predict the future and speak completely for RH but that he was
absolutely confident that EL8 would not have anything but NetworkManger.

That isn't the first, nor the last time I've heard that. At
Supercomputing 2016 in Salt Lake City, a RH employee made a similar
comment as well (again not in official capacity ect ect).

Assuming they are right, it looks like I am going to have it as a future
tool. Add to it a current project in which the client is specifically
asking for integration with it AND the potential for Infiniband (which
NetworkManager is supposed to handle well), and I find myself needing to
learn it now.

At least one good thing has come from me studying this weekend. I
discovered the reason behind one of the oddities in networking on our
KVM server. So that was a plus! :-)

Thanks!
~Stack~