Well, I pulled a Bart Simpson. I tried for about 10 minutes and gave up.
Bakc with Ubuntu 16.04, I tried modifying the old networking script using the ifclass command. If the UBUNTU class was defined, it generated a /etc/netplan/10-interfaces file. Otherwise, it ran the old code to generate a /etc/networking/interfaces file.
I think the reason I couldn't get it to work was because of a bug in NetworkManager. It looked like NetworkManager would neither make that interface work nor release it so it could be configured by netplan. This was a long time ago and my memory is a little fuzzy but I recall typing in network manager commands to try to get it to stop managing the interface, it saying it wasn't managing the interface, while at the same time, a listing of the interfaces it managed showed the interface. Now that I think about it, I believe I worked on it for way more than 10 minutes because I recall doing a file-by-file comparison of the configs from a regular Ubuntu install and an FAI install and finding no difference. The files in /etc were identical yet it worked in a normal install of Ubuntu but not in the FAI install.
I finally just added ifupdown to the packages installed during an Ubuntu install. So I've been subverting Ubuntu's normal network config process for years now. I just don't do it the way Ubuntu would normally do it. I figure when/if Debian switched to netplan, the FAI developers will modify FAI to account for it.
Now that you've brought it up though, I might give it another try when I upgrade all of my workstations to Ubuntu 18.10 during semester break in January. If I get it to work, I can post a howto here.
On 10/17/18 8:05 AM, Robert Markula wrote:
Hi, I'm currently in the process of updating tried-and-trusted FAI 4.2.5 to 5.7.2 and completely reworking the config space in the process, starting with the examples provided by fai-doc (which, btw, has been quite a surprisingly pleasant experience so far, as fewer customization is necessary in order to support different distributions as it was the case with the ancient 4.2.5 version. Nice!) Two questions arose so far: 1. Is the 'UBUNTU' class intended to be complementing the 'DEBIAN' class or does it completely replace the DEBIAN class? 2. Ubuntu 18.04 now uses a different network configuration utility called 'netplan' [1]. However, I don't see support for that in the example configspace. So while a Ubuntu Bionic host can be successfully installed using the 'FAIBASE UBUNTU DEMO' classes, it has no network connectivity as the netplan configuration is missing from the examples. Has anybody successfully integrated netplan support yet? Robert [1] https://netplan.io
