So I’m working on a server from home.
I do a cat /sys/class/net/eth0/operstate and it says unknown despite the interface being obviously up, since I’m SSH’ing into the box.
I try to explicitely set the interface up to force the status to say up with ip link set eth0 up. No joy, still unknown.
Hmm… maybe I should bring it down and back up.
So I do ip link set eth0 down and… I drive 15 miles to work to do the corresponding ip link set eth0 up
50 years using Unix and I’m still doing this… 😥
Use cockpit by Red Hat. It gives you a GUI to make networking changes*, and will check if the connection still works before making the change. If the connection doesn’t work (like the ip addresses changed), it will undo the change and then warn you. You can then either force the change through or leave it be.
*via NetworkManager only.
That’s probably because of netplan, right? You should be able to get the same results with just
netplan try.Netplan is an abstraction layer, so it can go over systemd-networkd, NetworkManager, or iproute. I suppose it’s better though, because it can be used with multiple backends.
Right, but the entirety of Cockpit is not necessarily required.
You don’t need to install cockpit on the server being configured, you can use it as a gui to connect from other machines via the flatpak, over ssh.
Right.
My point is that a wrench was needed and a batmobile was recommended.
No. Netplan uses it’s own yaml format, which people would have to learn and use. I don’t want to do that, I would rather just configure my existing networkmanager setup, rather than learning another abstraction layer over what is already an abstraction layer.
I understand that cockpit (and similar type tools) are “the whole kitchen sink” of utilities, and it may seem like they come with more than you may need. But that doesn’t change the fact that they get the job done, and in some usecases, are better than dedicated tools.