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Comment by imoverclocked | Hacker News Reader

Network configuration (on say, Debian) is still a pain and has a lot of different ways of accomplishing similar tasks. Anything beyond the plain vanilla singular network device that is either dhcp/static is often painful. Systemd has some sauce, there is legacy /etc/network* stuff, there are daemons which can be configured graphically… it’s still a mess. In this arena, I think systemd has failed for the last decade. It introduced yet another way of doing things without considering the whole scope of what it needed to replace.

I’m old enough to remember the culture wars and even older to remember a well thought out approach to overall configuration in Debian given the available tools of the time.

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Yes, this. The problem with systemd isn't systemd. It's that it never really replaced the other "legacy" parts effectively. Networking is a fantastic example. I'd be OK if there was one-definitive-place to configure networking, but when I read an article or follow a stack-overflow post, I'm not sure if what I'm changing is the most correct change or if its deprecated in favor of something newer. Systemd, I thought, would help settle this problem, but instead has only contributed to it.

Isn’t the number one problem here that you’re following a Stack Overflow post? Your system should have good documentation on how to configure networking, or some obvious sanctioned way to do it, such as a GUI widget. If your system has neither, that’s the problem. If it has one or the other and you’re using Stack Overflow anyway, that’s the problem.

Note I said “good” documentation - many Linux systems have lousy documentation and they lack an obvious, sanctioned way to do it. Again, that’s the problem.

Networking on linux is wildly powerful. Most desktop/SOHO installations would just be Wifi + DHCP. Maybe some VPN in the mix. But on the other side of the scale, there are routers with complex netfiltering, vlans, crazy GRE Tunnels, Tun/Tap, Wireguard, macvlans split between namespaces, bridges, etc, you name it.

Defining a straightforward configuration structure for that complexity is going to be insane. NetworkManager + Debian's /etc/network/interfaces (IMHO) seems to be a good fit: auto config w/ a GUI in NM in the simple case, and if the interface is listed in /etc/network/interfaces, you can do it anyway you want with Debian's system, with pre-up, up, post-up, post-down, etc scripts to your heart's content to setup whatever complexity you need.

My main gripe hasn't been that I want something done an exact way. It's that I want to achieve some semblance of what I'm trying to do in a reasonable amount of time.

NetworkManager is god awful in this regard. Even for simple desktop uses, if I want something more advanced than simply connecting to the Wi-Fi (even this requires finagling), then I'm fucked.

For example, I've been trying to find what it is that keeps overwriting /etc/resolv.conf.

After reading through various man pages and online forums, I still don't know. Instead, I just stick to one access point, and manually write to /etc/resolv.conf everytime I boot.

Compare this to OpenBSD: nothing fucking touches my /etc/resolv.conf. That file is mine. I write to it and other daemons read from it.

I've been trying to find what it is that keeps overwriting /etc/resolv.conf

  chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf

and watch the logs for errors/crashing services. It's sad, I know, but sometimes you do need a landmine to identify the trespassers.

> Network configuration (on say, Debian) is still a pain

What specifically is a pain? Have you used it recently?

Maybe my end-user desktop network requirements aren't complex enough but it's been pretty damn smooth in my experience for the last few years. I used to avoid network-manager with wicd, but now it seems pretty stable. I use the network-manager and network-manager-gnome packages to get the toolbar thingy in i3wm, it's very simple to use. I also combine it with wiregaurd using the wg commands.

Are you doing something more sophisticated like routing traffic? or something else in a server context? I literally can't recall having a single networking issue that was Debian's fault over the last few years, throughout using lots of different APs.

I recently installed two Linux VMs on my laptop. One, running the latest Ubuntu, got the network interfaces (yes, I have two defined) working as I wanted. The other one, running CentOS 7.9 (because that's what we're stuck with at $JOB) doesn't, with the same network setup. Both are using systemd (something I've tried to avoid as I'm very old school when it comes to Unix administration [1]) and I've yet to figure out what is going on. The set up is easy, first interface, non-NAT, gets address via DHCP. Second interface, NATted through the laptop. CentOS interfaces are completely borked upon boot up, and it takes about 10 minutes of constant enabling/disabling the interfaces to get them "up". Pre-systemd, I might have had a chance to just hard code the network settings (which would work for my setup). These days? I'm feeling more and more computer illiterate as time goes on.

[1] I'm a developer who can admin a Unix system if forced to, but how to administrate Unix has changed at least three times since I first learned in the mid 90s, and I'm tired of the constant changes (shakes my old-man fists at the sky).

For me the best battle test was to set up a re-establishing vpn-pptp (or was it lptp?). The issue was that the daemon, name long forgotten, used a default route to establish a VPN connection, then rewrote it with an in-channel ip received at the handshake. But when it crashed or stalled, the default route didn't exist in the segment anymore and you had to re-dhcp it, somehow automagically detecting the situation.

Wonder if it solved it. If not, what's the fuss.

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