subiquity installer : ibmveth disabled by default

[Frédéric Bonnard]

Hi,

on PowerVM, when installing a ppc64el LPAR (P8, P9, P10) with an ibmveth network interface,
this one is disabled by default even if it works and has a working DHCP server entry leading
subiquity installer to propose to "Continue without network" whereas it actually has network.

One just need to edit the configuration of the specific network interface,
select (in my case) "IPv4 Method" and switch it from "Disabled" to "Automatic (DHCP)".
Once that this is saved, the interface gets its IP address.

Not sure why it is disabled by default.

Would it be possible to have ibmveth interfaces enabled by default as other interfaces
seems to be ?

This happens on 20.04, 21.04.

Thanks,
F.

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

Subiquity only enables eth* and en* by default. We can add ibmveth* to the list easily enough. (It's unreasonably hard to tell if an interface is a normal wired link vs some virtual or wifi stuff!)

[Frédéric Bonnard (frediz)]

That would be nice!
What is the rational behind the choice of not enabling wifi for instance ?

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

wpa_supplicant is not part of the server seed, so by default a server install could only join an unencrypted wifi network, which doesn't seem very useful. There is a chance that we will do the work to make wifi work properly at some point, but we're not there yet.