Canonical plans to unify and clean network settings in Ubuntu

Martin Pitt, the systemd manager of the Ubuntu operating system, announced that Canonical plans of unify and clean Ubuntu network settings through a new project called "netplan". Current versions of the Ubuntu operating system automatically generate interfaces during system installation ifupdwon in the route etc / network / interfaces. On the other hand, Ubuntu Cloud uses a YAML-based format. Neither option offers a simple way to automatically pre-configure the NetworkManager network connection management software that is used by default on Ubuntu-based distributions, and that is exactly what Canonical wants to change.

netplan promises to provide network configuration files /etc/netplan/*.yaml for all versions of Ubuntu Linuxincluding desktop, Server, Snappy, MaaS, and Cloud. With netplan, all installers will generate only those YAML-based network configuration files instead of the / etc / network / interfaces, giving developers the flexibility to dynamically switch between multiple backends.

netplan is already present in Ubuntu 16.10

netplan and nplan are already present in the current build daily from Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak, the next version of Ubuntu that will be released in October of this year. The package plan It is now available in the Ubuntu 16.10 default repositories and will become the standard for all Ubuntu flavors in the coming weeks. Currently, plan 0.5 supports Ethernet, Wi-Fi (AP, ad-hoc and infrastructure) and Bridges configurations.

Any user can test the new packages by installing the build daily latest Ubuntu 16.10, but personally I wouldn't recommend it. There is still a long way to go before the release of a reliable beta of the next Ubuntu version and I would wait until the release of one of the official betas. If you decide to install the new versions, do not hesitate to leave your experiences in the comments.