NetworkManager 0.9.10 released

[Posted June 22, 2014 by corbet]

NetworkManager 0.9.10 is out with a long list of new features including a curses-based management interface, more modular device support, data center bridging support, many new customization options, better cooperation with other network management tools, and more. (Correction: the release is almost out, being planned for "later this week").

NetworkManager 0.9.10 released

Posted Jun 22, 2014 14:32 UTC (Sun) by ilpianista (guest, #97570) [Link]

RC1 is out, not final: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/networkmanager-list/2014-...

NetworkManager 0.9.10 released

Posted Jun 22, 2014 14:50 UTC (Sun) by Chousuke (subscriber, #54562) [Link] (4 responses)

The feature list for this looks damn impressive. Before, I avoided relying on networkmanager for anything but simple DHCP and VPN client setups because I felt its tooling was seriously lacking. With this release, it looks like it might actually be worth using more seriously

NetworkManager 0.9.10 released

Posted Jun 23, 2014 9:31 UTC (Mon) by russell (guest, #10458) [Link] (3 responses)

I used network manager for vpns for a while. Until a vpn connection dropped, then network manager ( ever eager to please and make life easy ) just sent the traffic across the internet in the open rather than blocking traffic.

This is not a problem if the remote end doesn't accept traffic other than VPN encrypted packets. But if I'm using a VPN for anonymity or for circumventing geoblocking. That's a problem.

Who knows what other helpful features are present. It's not transparent, so I can't trust it.

NetworkManager 0.9.10 released

Posted Jun 23, 2014 10:50 UTC (Mon) by jonnor (guest, #76768) [Link] (2 responses)

Several bugs open around this at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=NetworkMan...

I think there should be a global/interface-wide "never allow traffic not using VPN".

NetworkManager 0.9.10 released

Posted Jun 23, 2014 15:38 UTC (Mon) by dcbw (guest, #50562) [Link] (1 responses)

Right. More specifically, there is:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=349151
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=680955

But there's already been a feature called "secondary connections" since 0.9.4 I believe, that ties a VPN to a normal connection. If the VPN fails, that also fails the normal connection. You can find this in the "General" tab of nm-connection-editor:

"Automatically connect to VPN when using this connection"

Quite possibly under-publicised... but we'll still look into those two bugs above too, because they make sense.

NetworkManager 0.9.10 released

Posted Jul 3, 2014 13:19 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

While the normal connection is up, but before the VPN connection is up, will traffic be routed through the normal connection?

NetworkManager 0.9.10 released

Posted Jun 22, 2014 19:43 UTC (Sun) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (2 responses)

Cool! Although I remember the early versions having curses based management as well... I was constantly swearing at it :D (sorry, bad joke, I know, I know....)

NetworkManager 0.9.10 released

Posted Jun 23, 2014 15:33 UTC (Mon) by dcbw (guest, #50562) [Link] (1 responses)

That was the redhat "system-config-network" tool that actually wasn't NetworkManager related at all. It was eventually killed for various reasons, and then it turned out a segment of people really did want that functionality. So we wrote 'nmtui' from scratch to fill the gap between CLI and GUI.

NetworkManager 0.9.10 released

Posted Jun 23, 2014 18:24 UTC (Mon) by jlargentaye (subscriber, #75206) [Link]

I think that's a *whoosh*, but thanks for the information, and thanks for your work!

NetworkManager 0.9.10 released

Posted Jun 23, 2014 19:06 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (8 responses)

I've been using network-manager for doing gui-less stuff for a while now.

The main configuration changes I do to make it work for me is:

First to disable having a 'default' for interfaces. That way unless I explicitly configure a device NetworkManager won't try to configure it.

The second thing I do is to disable the 'native' configuration plugins like ifcfg and use only the NetworkManager-specific keyfile configuration plugin.

Then I often disable resolv.conf changes on any system that connects to more then one network.

NetworkManager 0.9.10 released

Posted Jun 24, 2014 6:04 UTC (Tue) by Darkmere (subscriber, #53695) [Link] (7 responses)

As a side-note, how do you do those latter two things? Disable config plugins and resolv.conf?

NetworkManager 0.9.10 released

Posted Jun 24, 2014 13:05 UTC (Tue) by knan (subscriber, #3940) [Link] (2 responses)

chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf

NetworkManager 0.9.10 released

Posted Jun 24, 2014 15:27 UTC (Tue) by dcbw (guest, #50562) [Link] (1 responses)

This has had problems historically, not just for NM but for other programs too, so best thing to do with NM 0.9.10 is:

[main]
dns=none

NetworkManager 0.9.10 released

Posted Jul 2, 2014 9:04 UTC (Wed) by knan (subscriber, #3940) [Link]

Obviously. But having resolv.conf overwritten was a bigger problem at the time.

I look forward to the day when 0.9.10 aka the sane version is everywhere. By about 2018.

NetworkManager 0.9.10 released

Posted Jun 24, 2014 14:24 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (3 responses)

This example disables auto default configs, selects only the keyfile configuration and disables changes to dns:

$ cat /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf
[main]
plugins=keyfile
no-auto-default=*
dns=none

There is also a option to use dnsmasq for handling dns changes. Check out 'man NetworkManager.conf'.

Also the configuration options for the 'keyfile' can be found here:

https://developer.gnome.org/NetworkManager/0.9/ref-settin...

Usually I'll use nm-applet or nmtui (or whatever) to generate a sample configuration which then I use as a template for generating configurations.

NetworkManager 0.9.10 released

Posted Jun 24, 2014 15:29 UTC (Tue) by dcbw (guest, #50562) [Link] (1 responses)

A long-requested docs feature is to better document the keyfile format, which is being tracked in:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=683111

NetworkManager 0.9.10 released

Posted Jun 24, 2014 15:55 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Yes, this is definitely needed.

NetworkManager 0.9.10 released

Posted Jun 24, 2014 22:30 UTC (Tue) by Darkmere (subscriber, #53695) [Link]

Thanks! Useful information that I had missed. I'll have to look into the dnsmasq settings, those seem very useful.

Now to see if it also works on debian, or if it's broken there due to "reasons"...