NetworkManager

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NetworkManager
Original author(s)Red Hat
Developer(s)mostly Red Hat
Initial releaseNovember 19, 2004; 19 years ago (2004-11-19)
Stable release
1.46.0[1] Edit this on Wikidata / 22 February 2024; 2 months ago (22 February 2024)
Repository
Written in
GNU GPL
Websitenetworkmanager.dev

NetworkManager is a

libudev
and other Linux kernel interfaces (and a couple of other daemons) and provides a high-level interface for the configuration of the network interfaces.

Rationale

NetworkManager is a software utility that aims to simplify the use of computer networks. NetworkManager is available for Linux kernel-based and other Unix-like operating systems.[citation needed]

How it works

Linux kernel: network device drivers and network stack. Utility programs are not depicted, they communicate through the SCI with the different components of the kernel.

To connect computers with each other, various

PPPoE, PPPoA, and many many more. Each participating computer must have the suitable hardware, e.g. network card or wireless network card
and this hardware must be configured accordingly to be able to establish a connection.

In case of a monolithic kernel all the device drivers are part of it. The hardware is accessed (and also configured) through its device driver. In case of Linux, the kernel presents for each device driver a representation in form of a device file. All device files are found in the /dev directory, and traditionally the device files for Ethernet hardware have been named eth0, eth1, etc. Since systemd, they are named differently: enp4s0, etc. (This abstraction is called the everything is a file concept.)

Anything in user-space accesses the hardware through its device file. The configuration utility to configure the hardware, and programs like the web browser/SSH/NTP-client/etc. to send and receive network packets.

Configuration of network interfaces without NetworkManager

On Linux and all Unix-like operating systems, the utilities ifconfig and the newer ip (from the iproute2-bundle) are used to configure IEEE 802.3 and IEEE 802.11 hardware. These utilities configure the kernel directly and the configuration is applied immediately. After boot-up, the user is required to configure them again.

To apply the same static configuration after each boot-up, the PID1-programs are used:

Fedora and its derivatives, and DNS-servers in /etc/resolv.conf. /etc/network/interfaces or /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* can define a static IP-address or dhclient to be used, and all kinds of VPN
can be configured here as well.

In case the configuration has to be changed, DHCP-protocol goes a long way to do so automatically, without the user even noticing.

Configuration of network interfaces with NetworkManager

  • NetworkManager is accessible via dbus.
  • Configuration is stored in /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf

But as we've transitioned from physically large servers to more portable hosts that may be plugged and unplugged (or moved from WiFi hotspot to WiFi hotspot) at the user's discretion, dynamic configurations (i.e., not stored in a static configuration file but taken from outside the host, and potentially changing after boot) have become a more prevalent configuration.

DHCP is still very common. Many Unix-like systems include a program called dhclient to handle this dynamic configuration. Given a relatively static or simple dynamic configuration, static configuration modified by dhclient works well. However, as networks and their topologies get more complex, a central manager for all the network configuration information becomes more essential.[citation needed
]

Software architecture

NetworkManager has two components:

  1. the NetworkManager daemon, the actual software which manages connections and reports network changes
  2. several
    Cinnamon
    , etc.

Both components are intended by the developers to be reasonably portable, and the applet is available to desktop environments which implement the Freedesktop.org System Tray Protocol,[2] including GNOME, KDE Plasma Workspaces, Enlightenment (software) and Xfce. As the components communicate via D-Bus, applications can be written to be “link-aware”, or to replace the provided applet entirely. One example is KNetworkManager, a KDE frontend to NetworkManager developed by Novell for SUSE Linux.

Graphical front-ends and command line interfaces
  • The GUI shows all available APs. The user merely needs to click on the desired one.
    The GUI shows all available APs. The user merely needs to click on the desired one.
  • Graphical front-end for GNOME Shell 3.10
    Graphical front-end for GNOME Shell 3.10
nm-applet
nm-applet is the GNOME applet for NetworkManager.
nmcli
nmcli is NetworkManager's built-in command-line interface added in 2010.[3] nmcli allows easy display of NetworkManager's current status, manage connections and devices, monitor connections.
nmtui
nmtui is a built-in text-based user interface.[4] nmtui is relatively basic compared to nmcli, which only allows users to add/edit a connection, activate a connection, and set the hostname of the system.
cnetworkmanager
cnetworkmanager command-line interface for NetworkManager.[5]

Mobile broadband configuration assistant

Antti Kaijanmäki announced the development of a mobile broadband configuration assistant for NetworkManager in April 2008;[6] it became available in NetworkManager version 0.7.0. Together with the package mobile-broadband-provider-info the connection is easily configured.

History

SSIDs to which the user has never connected. The user is prompted for WEP or WPA
keys as needed.

The NetworkManager project was among the first major Linux desktop components to utilize D-Bus and HAL extensively. Since June 2009, however, NetworkManager no longer depends on HAL, and since 0.9.10 (ca. 2014), neither does it require the D-Bus daemon to be running for root operation.[7]

See also

  • Linux on the desktop
  • BlueZ
  • GNOME Keyring Manager
  • usbserial
  • Wicd – network manager written in Python
  • wpa_supplicant
  • wvdial
  • netifd – tiny daemon with the ability to listen on netlink events; does not require D-Bus, does not depend on GLib, targets embedded devices
  • ConnMan – daemon for managing Internet connections within embedded devices

References

  1. ^ "1.46.0". 22 February 2024. Retrieved 22 February 2024.
  2. ^ Pennington, Havoc. "System Tray Protocol Specification". Standards.freedesktop.org. Retrieved 2012-02-04.
  3. ^ "Initial pieces of nmcli, gitweb". cgit.freedesktop.org. Retrieved 2015-05-28.
  4. ^ "Network Configuration Using a Text User Interface (nmtui) - Red Hat Customer Portal". Red Hat. Archived from the original on 2017-11-16. Retrieved 2017-11-16.
  5. ^ "cnetworkmanager - Command Line Interface for NetworkManager". Vidner.net. Archived from the original on 2011-07-24. Retrieved 2012-02-04.
  6. ^ "Announce on networkmanager-list". Mail.gnome.org. 2008-04-10. Retrieved 2012-02-04.
  7. ^ "We'll Build A Dream House Of Net". Blogs.gnome.org. Retrieved 2015-05-28.

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=NetworkManager&oldid=1146534672"