Does anybody have experience with both systems enough to compare them?
I’m currently using ifupdown on my Debian server as that’s the default, but it seems that the modern way of managing the local network is via systemd-networkd so I’m contemplating putting the effort in to migrate.
Would those of you who have experience with it, recommend it?
In my short investigation, I have made the following observations:
using networkd means you can use networkctl to manually control the interfaces which is quite convenient
networkd aims to be fully declarative
networkd separates the creation of virtual interfaces (netdev files) from their configuration (network files)
networkd doesn’t support all networking features (e.g. namespaces)
networkd is systemd, but surprisingly I can’t find information on how to create other unit files that depend on the individual network files going up or down, other than networkd-dispatcher. I don’t like dispatcher because just like ifupdown it triggers all the scripts and you need if tests to exclude all interfaces you don’t need to be affected. I’d like to write unit files that can be targeted to activate and deactivate when a particular interface goes up or down.
networkd, other than via dispatcher, does not seem to support adding arbitrary commands to run like ifupdown supports via e.g. pre-down, post-up, etc.
Personally, I will use both: On servers with fixed network connections I will tend to use ifupdown; but on my linux laptops I’ll use networkmanager or networkd which tend to have nice UI’s for joining various forms of wifi networks. On my laptops for some VPN’s i"ll use the ifupdown configuration, which lets me setup all sorts of exotic configurations (bridges, vlans, vxlan, vpns, namespaces, etc.) The linux command line tooling has a litany of functions to check/test/diagnose/tweak networking settings, and they work across all the distros, AND they can reveal the full details of the network, as the kernel sees it. NetworkManager, networkd, connmann, etc, often omit details in the name of simplifying for the most common scenarios.
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Personally, I will use both: On servers with fixed network connections I will tend to use ifupdown; but on my linux laptops I’ll use networkmanager or networkd which tend to have nice UI’s for joining various forms of wifi networks. On my laptops for some VPN’s i"ll use the ifupdown configuration, which lets me setup all sorts of exotic configurations (bridges, vlans, vxlan, vpns, namespaces, etc.) The linux command line tooling has a litany of functions to check/test/diagnose/tweak networking settings, and they work across all the distros, AND they can reveal the full details of the network, as the kernel sees it. NetworkManager, networkd, connmann, etc, often omit details in the name of simplifying for the most common scenarios.