The officially official Devuan Forum!

You are not logged in.

#1 2020-01-30 14:45:25

bgstack15
Member
Registered: 2018-02-04
Posts: 205  

Rant about Container Linux, and network configurations

With the Red Hat purchase a year or two ago of CoreOS, the team behind Container Linux (formerly known as CoreOS), the release of Fedora CoreOS is now public!

Fedora CoreOS out of preview - Fedora Magazine

I dabbled with Container Linux at work for a month. It was kinda meh. It seemed pretty clear at the time that they had some original ways of doing things that they wrote, but those ways were being displaced by the "current trend." Like their own configuration for most things was slowly being supplanted by cloud-init. Each has their benefits and weaknesses. And, not everything in cloud-init was supported by Container Linux.

So, the linked article above refers to how the new Fedora CoreOS (the name throws back to the original name of the Fedora Core distribution) is configured for networking: Network Manager key files! So the age-old tried-and-true Red Hat method of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 is out. Even the systemd network configuration is out (never even knew that was a thing, but totally not surprised)! Perhaps mashing everything together in our nifty /etc/network/interfaces could have used a nice dot-dee makeover (and probably has; shows you how little I configure networking these days), but hot diggity, how many netconfig tools are there!?

I know the Red Hat distros made Network Manager required for anything fancier than a single IP address on a single network card. Thankfully, 99% of my work environment was single IP address on single nic.

I had the displeasure to learn about the Ubuntu netplan (yaml-based) network configuration tool, which aside from the silly whitespace problem, maybe wasn't quite so terrible. It's just a NIH solution looking for a problem.

Man, I really like the wicd network configuration tool! Coupled with a choice of dhcp client (dhclient, of course), wicd is lightweight, cross-distro, and does exactly what you want it to do. Devuan is great, because it's Debian with an init system that does only init system tasks. The user can choose each and every tool.


This space intentionally left blank.

Offline

Board footer