I love it when new and better ways are found to do things.
I love it that Linux is constantly improving and moving forward.
I’m willing to accept along the way some things seem to be mis steps (I’m looking at you snap packaging).
I love it that improved network configuration systems are being adopted because network configuration is a pain.
I love systemd and when new stuf comes out from the systemd project I think “gee I’m glad finally someone is taking a wholistic look at and fixing that messy inconsistent evolved corner of Linux and replacing it with well thought out powerful and integrated solution.”
Bring on the change, change is the best thing about computing and software. I own vintage computers but wouldn’t want to live there.
> I love it when new and better ways are found to do things.
I do, too. But I also really hate it when those new and better ways make things worse for me. Systemd does that in a couple of important ways. There is even some network-related startup stuff that I can no longer make work automatically at all. For me personally, systemd is a regression, not an advance.
But I also recognize that the Linux world is not duty-bound to make sure it remains excellent for me, and I've pretty much given up on advocating for my needs in the Linux space. There's no point, particularly with the systemd crowd.
I’ve been running Ubuntu boxes in prod since 12.x — there is no “improved” way to put an ip address on an interface besides writing something to a file in /etc, but every update this file changes, or it’s format does.
It’s bullshit and I wish it would end.
Alas, keeps the consultant bucks flooding in when we have to rewrite a load of cfgmgt to go to 24.04 I guess..
I just switch every system to systemd-networkd immediately. The same .ini sytax as for service files, and dependencies are easy to handle, e.g. on one system I have two physical Interfaces eth0 and eth1, I want two vlans on eth0, and then bridge one of those vlans with eth1 and then run a DHCP client on that bridge but at the same time assign an additional IP address. This is dead simple to describe with one .ini file per vlan/bridge. Seriously the first time I feel like I'm not fighting an archaic config syntax, fixing up crap in some post-hook.d script, or give up entirely on any config language and just have a convoluted script setting up everything manually.
It's also easy to explicitly express "weird" stuff like "run DHCP client and use all the config options except the default route". Seriously a couple times I needed to do dumb shit and was like "there's no way they let you do this" but no, there's a way to do it.
And I'm pretty positive the config files will stay stable over the coming years and any new networking features will get appropriate config options in newer versions.
Eh, I could. But I'm quite sure that the method of switching to systemd-networkd also requires the same if not much more maintenance as simply changing the ifconfig template every few years...
I really don't care about interface configurations that much. It's an annoyance, but one that's quite easy to fix. I think introducing yet another network configuration here isn't the answer, but my linux fleet just run k8s anyway and network config on the linux level is quite simple before we get into cillium/istio/etc :}
Sure, I made that choice at a time where after upgrading, Ubuntu suddenly wanted netplan, debian stayed with /etc/network/interfaces and I think fedora went with networkmanager. So I though f- it, they all have systemd so I'll give networkd a spin. And never looked back.
So maybe don't just switch out of the blue right now if you've got a working setup, but maybe keep it in mind for the next time. :)
I love it when new and better ways are found to do things.
I love it that Linux is constantly improving and moving forward.
I’m willing to accept along the way some things seem to be mis steps (I’m looking at you snap packaging).
I love it that improved network configuration systems are being adopted because network configuration is a pain.
I love systemd and when new stuf comes out from the systemd project I think “gee I’m glad finally someone is taking a wholistic look at and fixing that messy inconsistent evolved corner of Linux and replacing it with well thought out powerful and integrated solution.”
Bring on the change, change is the best thing about computing and software. I own vintage computers but wouldn’t want to live there.