Ubuntu 18.04: netplan support

[John G Heim]

It' may be worse than you know. Netplan uses something called yaml for 
it's config files. YAML is a newish config language, sort of a 
replacement and/or competitor for XML.  I am no fan of XML, believe me. 
I'm blind, you sighted people think you have it hard editing XML config 
files, try doing it by listening to the code. At the same time, I am not 
looking forward to learning yet another protocol that is essentially a 
programming language for config files.

I understand the drive. Every system has it's own syntax that ammounts 
to a programming language for it's config files. Knowing the syntax for 
bind9 config files doesn't help you one bit when writing a systemd 
config file. Samba uses a syntax borrowed from Windows INI files. About 
the only place I can think of where I didn't have to learn a new config 
file language is with apache and podcast feeds. Both use XML so if you 
understand the syntax for apache config files, you also understand the 
syntax for podcast feed files.

So I don't know what to think about netplan & YAML. Haven't made up my 
mind whether to hate it or love it.

On 10/17/18 9:19 AM, Justin Cattle wrote:
> We have quite a lot invested in ifupdown - we won't be using netplan for 
> servers on bionic.
> 
> I know that's not a helpful response, but if you decide not to use 
> netplan you won't be the only people :)
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> Just
> 
> 
> On Wed, 17 Oct 2018 at 15:11, John G Heim <jheim at math.wisc.edu 
> <mailto:jheim at math.wisc.edu>> wrote:
> 
>     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
>      >
> 
> 
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