A stable release of the NetworkManager interface for simplifying network parameter configuration is now available — NetworkManager 1.32.0. Plugins for supporting VPN, OpenConnect, PPTP, OpenVPN, and OpenSWAN are being developed within their own development cycles.
Key innovations in NetworkManager 1.32:
- A new option for selecting the firewall management backend has been added to NetworkManager.conf under [main].firewall-backend. By default, the backend is set to nftables, and when the file /usr/sbin/nft is absent on the system and /usr/sbin/iptables is present — the backend is set to iptables. In the future, another backend based on Firewalld is planned to be added. This feature can be used for configuring address translation with nftables (previously only iptables was used) when enabling the shared access profile.
- New options ‘ethtool.pause-autoneg’, ‘ethtool.pause-rx’, and ‘ethtool.pause-tx’ have been added to introduce delays in receiving or sending Ethernet frames. These options correspond to similar modes in the ethtool utility — ‘—pause devname [autoneg on|off] [rx on|off] [tx on|off]’.
- The parameter ‘ethernet.accept-all-mac-addresses’ has been added, allowing the network adapter to be switched to ‘promiscuous’ mode for analyzing transit network frames that are not addressed to the current system.
- The ability to perform reverse DNS lookups for configuring the hostname based on a name from DNS assigned to the issued IP address has been provided. This mode is activated using the hostname option in the profile. Previously, the getnameinfo() function was called to determine the hostname, which considered the NSS configuration and the name specified in the /etc/hostname file (the new feature allows setting the name solely based on resolving the reverse zone in DNS). Now, the hostname is queried through the API systemd-resolved, and if systemd is not used, the ‘nm-daemon-helper’ handler based on the NSS module ‘dns’ is launched.
- Support for routing rule types ‘prohibit’, ‘blackhole’, and ‘unreachable’ has been added.
- The behavior regarding traffic control rules has been changed — by default, NetworkManager now retains the already set qdiscs and traffic filter rules in the system.
- Mirroring of Wireless connection profiles in NetworkManager to iwd configuration files has been ensured.
- Support for DHCP option 249 (Microsoft Classless Static Route) has been added.
- Support for the kernel parameter ‘rd.net.dhcp.retry’ has been added, which controls the request for binding updates. IP address.
- Significant restructuring of the source texts has been completed.
- Changes have been made to the API that should not affect compatibility with existing add-ons. For instance, the processing of the PropertiesChanged signal and the D-Bus property org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties.PropertiesChanged, which have long been deprecated, has been discontinued. Definitions of structures in the NMSimpleConnection, NMSetting, and NMSetting classes have been hidden in the libnm library. The format 'connection.uuid' has been used as the primary key for identifying the connection profile.
Additionally, the release of the ConnMan network configurator version 1.40, developed by Intel, is noteworthy for its low resource consumption and the presence of flexible tools for extending functionality through plugins. ConnMan is used in platforms and distributions such as Tizen, Yocto, Sailfish, Aldebaran Robotics, Nest, and various consumer devices running on Linux-based firmware.
Intel has also released IWD version 1.15 (iNet Wireless Daemon), developed as an alternative to wpa_supplicant for connecting Linux systems to wireless networks. IWD can be used independently or as a backend for the Network Manager and ConnMan network configurators. The project is suitable for embedded devices and optimized for minimal memory and disk space usage. IWD does not utilize external libraries and only relies on the capabilities provided by the standard Linux kernel (just the Linux kernel and Glibc are required to operate).
The new version of ConnMan features only bug fixes related to the handling of auto-connection state and disconnection in Wi-Fi. A vulnerability caused by a buffer overflow in the DNS Proxy code has also been resolved. The new version of IWD implements support for exporting information about the background process, adds the ability to predict packet arrival intensity in VHT RX (Very High Throughput) mode, and supports the FT-over-DS procedure with multiple Basic Service Sets (BSS).
Source: opennet.ru
