removal of netplan

[James Gibbins]

Due to the lack of too many features, netplan is currently not usable for production use. What was removed and added as a result of netplan and would be required to restore full network functionality as it existed in 16.04?

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

what functionality is missing for you?

Currently netplan suports all of most complex confiugrations: bonds, vlans, bridges, nested, with route settings / nameserver settings, dhcp v4/v6, RA, mtu settings and so on and so forth.

note that netplan is simply a yaml configuration format which uses networkd or network-manager as backends. you are free to extend things directly in the backends too, e.g. to specify any extra networkd or networkmanager keys that are no available via netplan. There is no need to remove any packages, as without any netplan config, it becomes inert. And e.g. on upgrades ifupdown configuration is preserved and untouched.

Dekstops simply use NetworkManager directly by default, without neither ifupdown / networkd / netplan.

[James Gibbins (jfgibbins)]

There are quite a few open bugs, some of which I've put in that havn't not even been looked at that detail just some of the missing features.  That's just what was found in the first 15 minutes, and until resolved, testing won't even be able to progress to find additional issues.

      From: Dimitri John Ledkov <email address hidden>
 To: <email address hidden>
 Sent: Tuesday, October 31, 2017 3:50 PM
 Subject: [Bug 1729022] Re: removal of netplan

what functionality is missing for you?

Currently netplan suports all of most complex confiugrations: bonds,
vlans, bridges, nested, with route settings / nameserver settings, dhcp
v4/v6, RA, mtu settings and so on and so forth.

note that netplan is simply a yaml configuration format which uses
networkd or network-manager as backends. you are free to extend things
directly in the backends too, e.g. to specify any extra networkd or
networkmanager keys that are no available via netplan. There is no need
to remove any packages, as without any netplan config, it becomes inert.
And e.g. on upgrades ifupdown configuration is preserved and untouched.

Dekstops simply use NetworkManager directly by default, without neither
ifupdown / networkd / netplan.

--
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report.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1729022

Title:
  removal of netplan

Status in netplan:
  New

Bug description:
  Due to the lack of too many features, netplan is currently not usable
  for production use.  What was removed and added as a result of netplan
  and would be required to restore full network functionality as it
  existed in 16.04?

To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/netplan/+bug/1729022/+subscriptions

[James Gibbins (jfgibbins)]

So I would still like to know, on a new build 17.10, and going forward, what is required to remove any trace of netplan, and restore all packages, functionality, etc as it exists in 16.04. I'm sorry, but while the single location yaml idea is nice, it's not even close to production ready in the variety of environments that the current packages already handle without issue.

[Ted (user1938)]

This worked for me:

apt-get install ifupdown
apt-get purge nplan

Ensure your /etc/network/interfaces file is configured properly and reboot.

I ended up doing it because I couldn't find documentation that worked for static routes. Instead, the man page example had a static route to 0.0.0.0/0 as a top-level element via an IP address that wasn't even close to being in the same subnet as any other IP in the example.

[James Gibbins (jfgibbins)]

appreciate it. Hoping it was simple, but was worried about missing little things that may have been added/removed. I'm currently working on testing with netplan to do routes. Specifically route tables for source based routing. I might hit a few snags, but I think I have a path to follow and some assistance from ubuntu. If I can get my own network, I'll try and put in some time documenting up some features as well as missing examples.

Netplan has given me a headache for the moment, so I'm grumpy, but I'll work through it. :)

P.S. I think from a search standpoint, reference systemd-networkd to understand how it works rather than netplan. Then it's a matter of making sure netplan can parse and pass on to systemd to function. It's helping me.

[Lin (linubuntu)]

Thank you VERY MUCH for asking this! It saved me hours of debugging. I can't imagine why they would put this into the OS, but it makes an ordeal out of one of the simplest parts of the OS setup.

We simply could not get netplan to behave properly after hours of work. It is better to rip it out on production systems. God help us if they take away the ability to remove it.

[David Britton (dpb)]

See: https://netplan.io/examples, Question: I really do need ifupdown, can I still use it?

Closing this bug as it's really a question and the answer is stated.

Thanks.

[infowolfe (infowolfe)]

This bug was improperly closed and is still valid.

Netplan has zero provision for doing DHCP address-only: it's incapable of setting manual routes or more importantly for EXCLUDING routes, excluding DNS (by interface), and a myriad of other DHCP-related functionality that IS present in systemd-networkd and WAS available with ifupdown.

Among other things, the fact that netplan is _not_ writing (on 18.04 lts server) its files to /etc/systemd/network and is in fact causing any files placed into that location to be ignored by systemd-networkd is a massive problem, especially for those of us who're using Ubuntu in, for example, an AWS environment.

[infowolfe (infowolfe)]

Features missing from netplan that are _vital_ to multi-adapter/multi-network DHCP setups, but missing because netplan was rushed out with absolutely no consideration for server users/sysadmins:

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
    ignore-dhcp-option routers domain-name-servers domain-name

[karlsebal (karlsebal)]

Upgrade from 16.04 to 18.04 definitely broke my DNS – It would work by adding the nameserver manually in resolv.conf though. I had a vpn running – which is also broken after upgrade.

[Uqbar (uqbar)]

Netplan is definitely not suitable for server installation.
Please, either make it optional at installation or provide clean official directions to replace it with ifupdown.

[Luigi Calligaris (luigicalligaris)]

Netplan appears to be too immature, especially on important features like choosing which settings to import from the DHCP response, as mentioned by infowolfe. This bug is definitely still valid.

[Mikko Tanner (shapemaker)]

Adding my voice to the chorus. Netplan lacks features compared to ifupdown, support for OpenvSwitch among the others listed already. It should _not_ be the default on server installations.

[Max Ehrlich (queuecumber)]

I'm more concerned about why we even need this thing. What was wrong with just writing systemd .network/netdev files?

On ubuntu server 18.04, I tried making a .network file for a simple static config for one of my interfaces, putting it in /etc/systemd/network and apparently netplan was writing a file for that same interface to /run/systemd/network which was overriding whatever I was doing. Really annoying and frustrating

[Alexey Miasoedov (alexey-miasoedov)]

Indeed, I'd like to use pure systemd-networkd. How would I disable/remove neplan on a running system if I do not need ifupdown?

[spbike (bill-broadley)]

From what I can tell netplan doesn't support pre-up scripts or configuring IPoIB for connected mode.

Fortunately things seem fine if you disable netplan.

[Ken Sharp (kennybobs)]

WTH is the point in Netplan if we're already using systemd? What a load of crap! Disabling it via its own instructions doesn't work at all!

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

We've already stated that it's absolutely fine to use systemd only if you so wish, and all you need to do is remove the package 'netplan.io'. If what you want to do is use ifupdown again, then all you need to do is also reinstall 'ifupdown' -- and it won't be removed if you upgraded from a system that was already working. You can even just not write a .yaml file in /etc/netplan, and there won't be anything done by netplan -- it's designed to work that way -- no config, no action.

We're addressing features as quickly as we can, but if you think something is missing, please file a bug about the feature you would need rather than chime in on a bug that is already closed, will stay closed (since it was a support request, and we provided the response) and so far appears to only be a pile-in of complaints.

The point is: netplan is there, it makes people's life easier to configure networkd and NetworkManager, it's a simple syntax that you can just "remember" rather than having to incessantly look up in manpages. Sure, not all features are there yet, but we keep adding them. It's use is absolutely optional, you can configure systemd-networkd or NetworkManager directly if you want to or need to, and it doesn't get in the way whatsoever.

Short is: please file reasonable bugs about features you would like to see, and we will absolutely respond and do our best to implement them, or offer solutions. We can't offer more solutions on closed non-bug support requests when it has already been addressed.

[Q (thread13)]

@cyphermox

I would add my voice to the chorus as well -- yes netplan looks like a very good step forward, and yes it is immature (see e.g. https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2391351) and thus you _should_ have made it optional.

Also, netplan usage reference is very good -- but for an immature project that may have (and in fact does have) bugs, some "under-the-hood" admin/developer/hacker's overview would be essential; instead, your "troubleshooting" page assumes user's fault and correct code, which is not necessarily the case.

So since essentially an LTS system update may all of a sudden break all your networking, may be putting some simple instructions on how to chop netplan off the system on your netplan.io page would a little to avoid all this stress and confusion.

Thank you.