Minimal install diff from F16 to F19 (TC6)

[Dan Williams]

On Thu, 2013-06-20 at 12:13 -0600, Eric Smith wrote:
> Does NM in F19 support statically assigning multiple subnets to the
> same physical interface, WITHOUT using VLANs?  I often need that on
> server machines, and wasn't able to figure out any way to do it with
> NM on F17, but I haven't yet tried it on F19.

It's supported that for 4 or 5 years.  You don't need aliases at all,
you just add more IP addresses to your ifcfg file and NM applies them to
the interface.

ADDRESS2=10.0.0.1
PREFIX2=8
ADDRESS3=4.5.6.7
PREFIX3=29

> With the old-style network configuration, it was easy to manually
> configure this by creating /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/eth3:<n>
> config files.  Also, it was very easy to automate creating and
> removing them, while I have yet to be successful scripting changes to
> NM configurations, though probably I'm overlooking some simple way of
> doing that.

Aliases came about because the kernel APIs (and ifconfig) couldn't
handle multiple addresses on a single interface.  That hasn't been the
case for like 8 or 10 years though, since netlink happened, and thus you
can add as many as you want via NM or /sbin/ip or whatever.  Aliases
haven't been required for years.

> Previously it has seemed that the old-style network configuration was
> more robust than NM, though not as user-friendly. However, I know that
> NM has been getting more robust over time, so that may no longer be
> true.

We want NM to be *capable* of working on servers with static
configuration, and we want NM not to do anything surprising in these
setups.  Whether an admin chooses to leave NM enabled or not is up to
them, but we hope to add enough value that many *will* leave it enabled,
either for remote administration, or a consistent interface to configure
networking on the machine instead of 10 different tools, or an
easier-to-use CLI than /sbin/ip + vi/emacs + config files, or whatever.
That's where we're going.

I did some screencast demos for some of these features and posted them
to the Fedora NM wiki pages if you're interested in see where we're
going:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Tools/NetworkManager#Servers

Dan