> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).