What is the purpose of Netplan?

[espressobeanie]

Nothing progesses if it stays the same.

But all your scripts break

Not many of us remember how to connect to an 802.11b WEP network purely by command line and I don't have wooden wheels on my sleek silver BMW.

End rant.

Chili, wouldn't connecting to an 802.11b network be the same as connecting to an 802.11g/n/ac network since they run from the same iwconfig or nmtui command? Also, wooden wheels will become the new norm when fashionistas run out of new ideas. I mean, even Hollywood recycles the same garbage in their scripts when they run out of good ideas.

[chili555]

Chili, wouldn't connecting to an 802.11b network be the same as connecting to an 802.11g/n/ac network

Sure. But back in the day, we didn't have any Network Manager and had to connect by editing an /etc file or else entirely by command line. When Network Manager came along, it was buggy and derided by most and with almost the same language as netplan is today!

In Linux, the only constant is change!

[feychart]

With all due respect for my colleagues, few of you have longer, whiter beards than old Chili. I have seen a lot of things change over the many years that I've run Linux. Usually, the choice is to learn it now or learn it later. We can only put off change for so long until it is simply no longer supported, it's a security flaw and/or there is no-one left on the forums that even remembers it.

Not many of us remember how to connect to an 802.11b WEP network purely by command line and I don't have wooden wheels on my sleek silver BMW.

End rant.

It's not false: upstart, unity, mir & ubuntu touch!...

"Oh, Ubuntu, you were my favorite Linux-based operating system" -- me

[karl-childers]

netplan is the way of the future

1) Sorry to revive an old post, but I haven't had time to address netplan until now.
2) I really want to upgrade to netplan so I can upgrade to 18.04 without too much hassle. I wish there was a way to do-release-upgrade and specify netcfg/do_not_use_netplan=true
3) Netplan doesn't seem mature enough yet: It doesn't seem to support wpa2 enterprise (especially wpa_supplicant hashed passwords in yaml files). So I guess that means it is still in the future for me (not the present).

Please correct me if I am wrong. I know a pittance as compared to chili555.

PS: It seems I finally get my head around ifupdown and iptables and kaboom!, the rug gets pulled out from under me! That's life in the fast lane, I guess.

[chili555]

3) Netplan doesn't seem mature enough yet: It doesn't seem to support wpa2 enterprise (especially wpa_supplicant hashed passwords in yaml files). So I guess that means it is still in the future for me (not the present).

Please correct me if I am wrong.

Quite correct. Please see: https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/netplan/pull/29 It is being addressed but not quite done yet.

I think your current options are to upgrade, remove netplan and all its yamls, install ifup/down and continue the method with which you are familiar: or, continue with, I assume 16.04 LTS and keep watching for EAP support. I have no information as to when this may arrive.

On my own machine, I have installed 18.10 and a review of man netplan suggests that it isn't here yet.

[desdan]

Another non-fan of netplan here. Feels bloated to me. For those of us building machines as appliances it just feels unwieldy! Also - read a post that said if you get the indentation wrong when you edit the settings then it won't work - this is both stupid and scary. This was built for a gui. Fooey.
So - coming back to edit this a bit...
I wish they had put this in place with transition in mind. For a company whose product is based on Ubuntu changes like this can make life difficult. We must change working code. Ok - so life moves on, but if they had simply given us a way to link /etc/network/interfaces to netplan for several stable releases then we would have time to gracefully slide over to netplan. Instead we upgrade (because there are other important aspects of the new version(s)) and discover that something as basic as networking needs to be addresses and learned. Because we use Ubuntu server we try to abstract the complexity in a web interface and switching to netplan is non-trivial. I estimate my cost to switch to be several thousand dollars ... that kinda hurts. perhaps there's a package out there that will do interfaces -> netplan for you - if not there may be an opportunity there.
It seems drastic to just remove netplan altogether.

[uufor44400aa12]

Chiming in here to agree with everybody else in that the forcing of netplan into 18.04 was a mistake. As was mentioned before, the fact that netplan .yaml breaks if indentation is wrong goes a long way to describe the maturity state of netplan. Further, I haven't seen any concrete reasons for why this was forced upon users. As in, I don't see the problem that needed this as a solution.

If anything, the ability to decide between netplan and normal /etc/network/interfaces should have been part of the 18.04 install, instead of completely ripping it out.

[karl-childers]

Quite correct. Please see: https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/netplan/pull/29 It is being addressed but not quite done yet.

I think your current options are to upgrade, remove netplan and all its yamls, install ifup/down and continue the method with which you are familiar: or, continue with, I assume 16.04 LTS and keep watching for EAP support.

That's exactly what I did. Thanks for the info.
It also seems like a security hole if EAP is not implemented in netplan. Otherwise, the AP password has to be in the yaml file (or somewhere) plain text.

Insert editorial comment here critical of ubuntu rolling out netplan too soon

PS: I believe you should also disable netplan with grub in kernel args

/etc/default/grub:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="netcfg/do_not_use_netplan=true"

[emerth]

I miss 16 bit operating systems. Alas, time has moved on.

The Red Hat family is also moving away from /etc/network/interfaces. Change is inevitable. Nothing progesses if it stays the same.

I am old enough to remember when *nix user info and home were located in /usr. /etc was where stuff went when nobody was sure where it should go. Things have changed since I started with all of this stuff in the 70s.

That's a very condescending response. Not all change is advance. Netplan has fewer abilities than the Olde System.

I am also old enough to remember when "*nix user info and home were located in /usr. /etc was where stuff went when nobody was sure where it should go."

However Netplan still cannot configure anything other than Ethernet AFAICT. I communicated with it's authors a year or so ago and their response to my inquiry about IP over Infiniband was: "What's Infiniband?".

So Netplan really isn't an advance for everyone, and if you have nothing to contribute to solving the guy's problem perhaps you should not reply, yes?

[chili555]

Netplan still cannot configure anything other than Ethernet AFAICT.

I disagree. Please see the many templates at /usr/share/doc/netplan/examples. I have helped several posters set up wireless with netplan at askubuntu.com. For example: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1105...107570#1107570