[CentOS] NetworkManager fights with DHCP-only backup NIC

Tue Dec 2 21:14:35 UTC 2014
Warren Young <wyml at etr-usa.com>

On Dec 2, 2014, at 1:36 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 2, 2014 at 2:26 PM, Warren Young <wyml at etr-usa.com> wrote:
>> Again, I’m not really after a way to make this work without NetworkManager.  
> 
> What part of the breakage that NetworkManager does is good for a
> wired, static-addressed server?

If you disable NM, the network configuration GUI stops working in EL7.  (I didn’t do much with EL6, but I thought its GUI had a fall-back for the non-NM case.)

We don’t need this GUI, but our semi-technical customers sometimes do.  It can be the difference between rolling a truck to a remote site vs letting the on-site people take care of the problem.

> you should be able to ssh to some other box on the working network,

I did mention that these sites rarely have local staff who know Linux.  You can correctly infer from that there *are* no other SSH servers, just ours.

These are K-12 schools, for the most part.  They often don’t have technical staff on-site at all.  We have to schedule time with overworked district-level staff who often only know Windows to get anything at this level done.

We’ve built up nasty hacks to solve this before; VPN -> RDP -> PuTTY -> Linux server, for instance.  Getting protective network admins to allow all this can chew up weeks of time.

It’s far, far better if the Linux box just phones home with the info we need to fix it.  It can cut a 4-week phone tag game down to 15 minutes.