4.2.1. NetworkManager with system-wide connections and enhanced support for mobile broadband
NetworkManager can now create and edit system-wide network connections in
/etc/sysconfig.
NetworkManager has been able to read information about system-wide network connections from
/etc/sysconfig for a while. Now we have enabled full read-write support for system connections. The ability to create or modify new system connections will be controlled by
PolicyKit policies. Initially, only wired and wireless connections will be supported. Later on, VPN connections will follow. For connections that require secrets, those will be stored in
.keys files in
/etc/sysconfig.
By providing a database of preconfigured mobile broadband providers, supporting more hardware, and permitting scanning of GSM networks,
NetworkManager makes the use of mobile broadband much easier. Your broadband provider will be automatically recognized by
NetworkManager and it will make it easy to just plug in your USB device and get you online within minutes.
4.2.2. Enhanced IPv6 support in NetworkManager
For non-GUI users, and those that use
ifcfg files directly,
NetworkManager should bring up the interface with IPv6 connectivity correctly at boot. No modification of the
ifcfg files should be necessary.
For GUI users, a new IPv6 tab will appear in the connection editor which will allow for control of the IPv6 settings similar to control of IPv4 settings already. After selecting the configuration method (auto is the default, which will honor router-advertisements and attempt to retrieve DNS information with DHCPv6 information-only mode) and entering any additional settings they may wish to use, then saving the connection, activating that connection should configure the interface fully with IPv6 as requested by the user.
4.2.3. Network Interface Management
Configuring the network interfaces on a machine for moderately complicated yet common scenarios is generally only accessible to advanced users, and very poorly supported by existing tools. Such scenarios include creating a bridge and enslaving a physical NIC to it, or bonding two NICs, adding a VLAN interface to the bond and enslaving that to a bridge.
Complicated bridge setups are commonly needed on virtualized hosts, and often have to be performed remotely by higher-level management tools, rather than a human user.
This feature addresses these needs by providing a general-purpose network configuration library (netcf) and additions to the libvirt API to expose netcf's local API through libvirt's remoting facilities.
With netcf, a logical network interface (for example, a bridge and its slaves) is described as a unit, and netcf takes care of translating that description into the appropriate ifcfg-* files. To guarantee the happy coexistence of netcf with other network configuration utilities, including vi, netcf is bidirectional: it modifies ifcfg-* files based on a netcf interface description, but also reads ifcfg-* files to generate such a description. It is therefore possible to use netcf side-by-side with any other method of changing network configuration, and many of the pitfalls of earlier attempts to do this — for example, the Xen networking scripts — are avoided.
It is planned to switch NetworkManager to netcf as the backend for system-wide network configuration in a future release; while it is not part of this release, it will further unify the user experience around network configuration. Similarly, it is planned to expose network configuration functionality in a future release of virt-manager.
