Ubuntu 18.04: netplan support

[John G Heim]

Well, I pulled a Bart Simpson. I tried for about 10 minutes and gave up.

Bakc with Ubuntu 16.04, I tried modifying the old networking script 
using the ifclass command. If the UBUNTU class was defined, it generated 
a /etc/netplan/10-interfaces file. Otherwise, it ran the old code to 
generate a /etc/networking/interfaces file.

I think the reason I couldn't get it to work was because of a bug in 
NetworkManager. It looked like NetworkManager would neither make that 
interface work nor release it so it could be configured by netplan. This 
was a long time ago and my memory is a little fuzzy but I recall typing 
in network manager commands to try to get it to stop managing the 
interface, it saying it wasn't managing the interface, while at the same 
time, a listing of the interfaces it managed showed the interface. Now 
that I think about it, I believe I worked on it for way more than 10 
minutes because I recall doing a file-by-file comparison of the configs 
from a regular Ubuntu install and an FAI install and finding no 
difference. The files in /etc were identical yet it worked in a normal 
install of Ubuntu but not in the FAI install.

I finally just added ifupdown to the packages installed during an Ubuntu 
install. So I've been subverting Ubuntu's normal network config process 
for years now. I just don't do it the way Ubuntu would normally do it. I 
figure when/if Debian switched to netplan, the FAI developers will 
modify FAI to account for it.

Now that you've brought it up though, I might give it another try when I 
upgrade all of my workstations to Ubuntu 18.10 during semester break in 
January. If I get it to work, I can post a howto here.




On 10/17/18 8:05 AM, Robert Markula wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm currently in the process of updating tried-and-trusted FAI 4.2.5 to
> 5.7.2 and completely reworking the config space in the process, starting
> with the examples provided by fai-doc (which, btw, has been quite a
> surprisingly pleasant experience so far, as fewer customization is
> necessary in order to support different distributions as it was the case
> with the ancient 4.2.5 version. Nice!)
> 
> Two questions arose so far:
> 
> 1. Is the 'UBUNTU' class intended to be complementing the 'DEBIAN' class
> or does it completely replace the DEBIAN class?
> 
> 2. Ubuntu 18.04 now uses a different network configuration utility
> called 'netplan' [1]. However, I don't see support for that in the
> example configspace. So while a Ubuntu Bionic host can be successfully
> installed using the 'FAIBASE UBUNTU DEMO' classes, it has no network
> connectivity as the netplan configuration is missing from the examples.
> Has anybody successfully integrated netplan support yet?
> 
> 
> Robert
> 
> [1] https://netplan.io
>