Why include ifupdown AND NetworkManager?

[danboid]

Why does Armbian include both include ifupdown AND NetworkManager by default? I'm not aware of anything that ifupdown can do that NM cannot and ifupdown doesn't have a TUI/GUI like NM so as far as I'm concerned ifupdown is just clutter that causes config clashes and boot delays. Isn't it time to strip ifupdown from Armbian?

 

On a related note, I've never got any of the (ifupdown) network config options in armbian-config to work.

[danboid]

I'll give a good example of this causing a problem. I have an Armbian machine that only uses wifi. I set the wifi up using the included nmtui but there is an almost 2 minute boot delay caused by the default Armbian /etc/network/interfaces (ifupdown) config for eth0. Remove or comment this config and Armbian boots almost 2 minutes faster if eth0 isn't connected at boot.

[Igor]

Agree. This section needs changes. We are finally moving with https://github.com/armbian/configurator (not yet in human understandable format, but welcome to join inspecting the code) and once we get to the network config section, this should be adjusted. I think we should simply remove ifupdown and provide netplan, which can be use either for Network manager or systemd-networkd.

[danboid]

I know Ubuntu uses netplan by default but I prefer NetworkManager. The files are easier to configure by hand than netplans awful yaml plus netplan doesn't have alternatives to nmtui, nmcli and the GUI app. Everything has to be done by hand with netplan.

[danboid]

I wpouldn't want Armbian to do anything because Ubuntu is. I'm moving away from Ubuntu after 22.04 because Canonical are turning more apps into snaps which is destroying performance. I don't care about sandboxing or any other supposed benefit of snaps - having to wait 10x longer for apps to load is not acceptable.

[Dennboy]

Personally I like the networking service with configuration in /etc/network and /etc/wpa_supplicant much more than NetworkManager, it is much easier to setup and keep working. I have been fighting network-manager on SBCs for quite some time and ditched it on most of them by now. On PCs NetworkManager usually works ok.

[Dennboy]

some problems I had with network manager on Armbian on SBCs in the field (usually miles away with only a reverse ssh tunnel to reach it):

• it creates /etc/resolv.conf as textfile instead of linking to the runtime /run/resolvconf/resolv.conf
  • this often results in an SBC that no longer use DNS when the remaining network connection is using another service like Networking
• it has poor support for multi-homing (having multiple networks like wifi+eth simultaneously to the same or different routers), it sometimes takes away the default route of the other connection (e.g. when pulling the Ethernet cable)
• the nmtui tool is unsuitable to switch networks over an ssh session, it just freezes since the existing network connection is first dropped.

[ericpulvino]

I always love ifupdown2 which is in the debian repos. It comes from Cumulus Linux which uses debian devices as routers.

Basically a python-based upgrade to ifupdown. 

Has support for lots of more complex networking configurations like Bridges, VRF, VLANs, VxLANs etc.

 

In Armbian, I uninstall netplan and network-manger and install ifupdown2 (which removes ifupdown).

 

No GUIs or anything but that is irrelevant to me as I run my SBCs headless.