Past, Present and Future of Networking in Debian

Speaker: Lukas Märdian

Track: Systems administration, automation and orchestration

Type: BoF (45 minutes)

Room: Pado

Time: Aug 02 (Fri): 14:30

Duration: 0:40

As the upstream maintainer of Netplan, I want to discuss the current state of networking in Debian (NetworkManager on Desktop+Live images, Netplan+systemd-networkd on Cloud images, ifupdown on default d-i based images) and collect ideas of how we could improve and homogenize that landscape going forward.

/etc/network/interfaces (ifupdown) is the tried and trusted way to do networking on Debian, but many customize their installations to use alternative networking daemons such as NetworkManager or systemd-networkd instead (e.g. Bookworm cloud-images). Netplan has been the control interface for networking on Ubuntu since many years. It’s not a networking daemon in itself, but drives NetworkManager and systemd-networkd (besides others) underneath, combining the best of both worlds, while providing a common interface for network configuration.

Let’s get together, discuss the alternatives and approaches to network configuration and find a path to Debian’s networking future.