Networking

Networking features are nowadays important for virtually all users of Fedora and other linux distributions. Fedora's main network use cases are laptops, desktops, servers and virtualization. Fedora could also be used for routers, becoming part of networking infrastructure.

TODO: Move any QA related information to QA/Networking.

Current topics

• Fedora Networking TODO List

Networking concepts and configuration

Connectivity:

• Ethernet
• Addressing
• Routing
• Bridging
• VLAN
• Bonding / Teaming
• Tunneling

User experience:

• Hostname
• Name Resolution, DNS, DNSSEC
• Laptop and desktop configuration
• Server software operations
• Client software operations

Black magic:

• TCP, UDP and ICMP NAT
• Traffic control
• Network connectivity dependencies

Important networking projects

• Kernel
• GLIBC
• NetworkManager
• ISC DHCP

Known networking bugs

I moved all the information about known networking bugs to a separate article: Known networking bugs

Pieces of the puzzle

• Interface for static IPv4 and IPv6 configuration (kernel)
• Interface for bridging/bonding/vlan configuration (kernel)
• Interface for DNS configuration (/etc/resolv.conf)
• DHCP client implementation for IPv4 automatic configuration (dhclient)
• RA client implementation for IPv6 address configuration (kernel, with workarounds in NetworkManager)
• RDNSS/DNSSL client implementation for IPv6 DNS configuration (NetworkManager through kernel, with workarounds)
• DHCP client implementation for IPv6 address/DNS/other configuration (dhclient)
• IPsec, VPN and tunneling implementations (various daemons)
• A network management daemon to properly manage all of the above together with user configuration (NetworkManager)
• Networking API for applications (glibc, with many problems)

I may have missed something but the objective is to show that networking is rather complex and the various tools need to be centrally managed by a network management service in order to make users and administrators happy.

You can only live without network configuration daemons if you use static IP configuration and you avoid encrypted wireless networks at the same time. You can live with just wpa_supplicant and dhclient only if you are used to do most of the stuff yourself. Virtually all linux distributions now converge to network solutions based on network configuration daemons.

Examples of such daemons (without feature comparison):

• NetworkManager
• connman (MeeGo)
• WICD
• netifd (OpenWRT)
• netcfg (Archlinux)
• wicked
• systemd-networkd
• pyroute2 (?)

Yeah, it's a lot of fun writing new and new network configuration daemons.

Fedora feature pages

F20

• Features/NetworkManagerBridging
• Features/NetworkManagerBonding
• Features/NetworkManagerCLIAddConnection
• Features/FixNetworkNameResolution
• Features/NetworkManagerNameBasedConfiguration

Unknown

• Features/NetworkManagerAdvancedIPv6
• Features/DualstackNetworkTestingTools
• Features/ZeroconfNetworking
• Features/NetworkManagerRuntimeConfigurationAPI
• Features/NetworkManagerForInitramfs
• Features/NetworkManagerTestSuites
• Features/NetworkManagerTeaming

Testing

• IPv6

Contacts

• Name: Pavel Šimerda
• Email: psimerda@redhat.com, pavlix@pavlix.net
• IRC: pavlix, #nm at freenode

Use the above contacts or Talk:Networking for discussions about Networking page, its subpages, related pages and covered topics. Add yourself to the contacts if you want to help me maintaining this set of information resources.

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