NetworkManager is the default service in Fedora for interfacing with the low level networking in the Kernel. It was created to provide a high-level interface for initializing and configuring networking on a system without shell scripts. Over the past few Fedora releases, the NetworkManager developers have put in a lot of effort to make it even better. This article covers some of the major improvements that have been implemented in NetworkManager over the past few Fedora releases.

A brief history

The past few Fedora releases have highlighted the incredible amount of effort there has been in developing NetworkManager. Unfortunately NetworkManager has the legacy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (NM 0.8.1) in the minds of many people. The version in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 was pretty much only capable of handling a WiFi network and in all other scenarios had to be disabled and/or removed (the latter often being preferable).

Similar to how services used to be started and stopped by a series of shell scripts, network configuration in Fedora also used to be handled via several different shell scripts. These still exist as the “legacy network service” but they are fragile and have no concept of state. Anyone who has carried out changes to bonding or bridging knows the pain of carefully manually unpicking the present configuration with ifenslave, brctl or more recently ip and then hoping all the ifcfg-* files are correct. Or just bite the bullet and carry out that reboot.

Just as initially upstart and later systemd marked the end of running a series of shell script to configure a service with no concept of state, so NetworkManager marks the end of running a similar series of shell scripts to configure the network.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases don’t line up precisely but this should give an idea of the accelerated development over time, especially when compared to the NEWS file in the source repository.

Fedora Release RHEL Release NetworkManager Version 12 0.7.996 13 6.X 0.8.1 14 0.8.1 15 0.8.999 16 0.9.1.90 17 0.9.4 18 0.9.7 19 0.9.8.2 20 7.0 0.9.9.0 21 0.9.10.0 22 7.1 1.0.2 23 7.2 1.0.6 24 1.2.2 25 7.3 1.4.2 26 1.8.0

So what’s the major changes in the last few Fedora releases? Why should you now pay attention to NetworkManager and not remove it on your Server instances?

Keeping out of the way

There are situations where a running daemon or any risk of dynamic behaviour is not desired. Typically this has been where the legacy network service has been preferred because of the nature of one time fire and forget shell scripts. A few Fedora releases ago at NM 1.0 the ability to just act once and then hide was added.

cat > /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/c-and-q.conf <<EOF [main] configure-and-quit=true EOF

Documentation round-up

On IRC there’s often questioning about what is valid in the ifcfg-* files when using NetworkManager. There’s been a strong effort to improve this documentation locally on the system. The man pages of most interest are:

nm-settings The overall NetworkManager settings names that are valid for all types of interfaces. These are used on DBus to change NM behaviour or with the nmcli CLI command to configure the interfaces. nm-settings-ifcfg-rh The mapping of NM configuration options to how they are named in the ifcfg-* files. The terms used in the ifcfg-* files are not always the same as the property names on an interface so this is very useful to reference in a normal Red Hat environment of using those files. nmcli-examples A useful reference of many nmcli activities and this also includes the polkit policy information. NetworkManager.conf Configuration for the actual daemon itself and for lower level or default behaviours.

IPv6 is here! Pay attention to it!

As the doomsday clock for IPv4 continues to count down there are more and more networks enabling IPv6 connectivity. There’s been a lot of changes related to IPv6 in the last few releases. These are mostly bugfixes (for example an interface with only an automatic link-local fe80:: address is not considered connected) but the changes focusing on privacy are important to be aware of.

There’s been much concern about tracking of the MAC address of a system due to EUI64 encoding, which uses the MAC to automatically create an IPv6 address. There’s been two approaches to handle this from slightly different angles. First there was RFC4941 which involves automatically generating an address and using it for a period of time before generating a new address and so on. This can be configured in NM on a connection by the property

ipv6.ip6-privacy

but it’s better to handle it at the kernel level with

net.ipv6.conf.default.use_tempaddr=2

to prefer using a temporary address, so that everything is aware of the configuration. NetworkManager will respect the sysctl setting by default. The sysctl property to set the lifetime this temporary address is valid for is

net.ipv6.conf.default.temp_prefered_lft

.

The downside of this is that anything which uses the IP to carry out session tracking (secure cookies could be an example here) risks losing the session with the change of IP.

The second approach to handle privacy (which can be used alongside the temporary addressing) is RFC7217 which allows for a random, but stable, IPv6 address on a connection. This works by creating a secret key for the system from /dev/urandom and then using the connection UUID with that to create the random address, but one which stays the same for the connection. This is now used instead of EUI64 by default, but the predictable address can be used instead in an environment that needs that predictability in SLAAC.

Privacy protection of the system MAC

Particularly with WiFi being a commonplace feature in our society it’s not just the IP layer that has privacy concerns but also the lowest level of the MAC address.

Just as recently as Fedora 24 (and EL7.3) NetworkManager began using a random MAC whilst scanning for access points to use. The default at present is to use whatever the MAC of the interface is (or preserve if it’s been set in advance with a tool like macchanger) however similar to the IP layer it’s now possible to set

cloned-mac-address

on a connection to RANDOM for a totally random MAC each time that connection is activated or STABLE to mimic the IPv6 behaviour of a randomly generated address that stays consistent with a connection.

Bridging, teams and bonding

Previously there were special virtual interface types of

team-slave

,

bond-slave

and

bridge-slave

that had to be declared when using a bridge, team or bond. Although the underlying framework supported stacking these together (along with vlan tagging as well) it wasn’t possible to directly create the “stack” via the nmcli utility, as each had an underlying assumption that they had to be on a physical interface (type ethernet).

Recently these special interface types were dropped with just a

master

connection property being used to arbitrarily stack this stuff together. This is particularly important on a server environment with a host that is used to house multiple guest virtual machines linked to different networks.

Prior to NM 1.2 this was the juggling of nmcli commands needed to bring three interfaces together, with vlans tagged and bridges defined on these for guests to connect to:

nmcli connection add type bond con-name bond0 mode active-backup nmcli connection add type bond-slave ifname eth2 master mybond nmcli connection add type bond-slave ifname ens9 master mybond nmcli connection add type bond-slave ifname ens10 master mybond nmcli connection add type bridge con-name bridge0 ifname bridge0 connection.autoconnect yes ipv4.method manual "10.0.0.1/24" nmcli connection add type bridge con-name bridge60 ifname bridge60 connection.autoconnect yes ipv4.method manual "10.0.60.1/24" nmcli connection add type bridge con-name bridge100 ifname bridge100 connection.autoconnect yes ipv4.method manual "10.0.100.1/24" nmcli connection add type vlan con-name vlan-60 dev bond0 id 60 nmcli connection add type vlan con-name vlan-100 dev bond0 id 100 nmcli connection down bond0 nmcli connection down vlan-60 nmcli connection down vlan-100 nmcli connection modify bond0 connection.master bridge0 connection.slave-type bridge nmcli connection modify vlan-60 connection.master bridge60 connection.slave-type bridge nmcli connection modify vlan-100 connection.master bridge100 connection.slave-type bridge nmcli connection up bond-slave-eth2 nmcli connection up bond-slave-ens9 nmcli connection up bond-slave-ens10 nmcli connection up bond0 nmcli connection up bridge0 nmcli connection up vlan-60 nmcli connection up bridge60 nmcli connection up vlan-100 nmcli connection up bridge100

With the change to allow arbitrary layering and the removal the the special *-slave type this has simply becomes:

nmcli c add type bridge ifname bridge0 con-name bridge0 connection.autoconnect yes ipv4.method manual ipv4.addr "10.0.0.2/24" nmcli c add type bridge ifname bridge60 con-name bridge60 connection.autoconnect yes ipv4.method manual ipv4.addr "10.0.60.2/24" nmcli c add type bridge ifname bridge100 con-name bridge100 connection.autoconnect yes ipv4.method manual ipv4.addr "10.0.100.2/24" nmcli c add type vlan con-name vlan-100 dev bond0 id 100 master bridge100 connection.autoconnect yes nmcli c add type vlan con-name vlan-60 dev bond0 id 60 master bridge60 connection.autoconnect yes nmcli c add type bond ifname bond0 con-name bond0 connection.autoconnect yes master bridge0 bond.options mode=active-backup nmcli c add type ethernet ifname eth1 con-name eth1 master bond0 connection.autoconnect yes nmcli c add type ethernet ifname eth2 con-name eth2 master bond0 connection.autoconnect yes nmcli c add type ethernet ifname eth3 con-name eth3 master bond0 connection.autoconnect yes

This release also brought the ability to manage many more types of devices such as macvlan, vxlan and tunnels.

So, what’s next?

Somewhat surprisingly the current Fedora release matches the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 version of NetworkManager for the moment, but Fedora 26 is right around the corner.

This will bring a jump all the way up to 1.8.0, which of course gets the 1.6.0 improvements in the process.

It’s worth checking out the developer blogs for 1.6.0 and 1.8.0 but some of the key things to look out for are MACsec support for networks that require Layer2 encryption, IPv6 connection sharing (which uses Prefix Delegation) and better handling of restarts of the NetworkManager service.

In researching this article there’s only a couple of areas left that I can see need the legacy network service.

Use of openvswitch Openstack deployments

Outside of this there’s no reason to disable NetworkManager any longer.

As for the future? Well there’s always work to do!