NetworkManager 1.26 Brings Autoconnect for Wi-Fi Profiles, firewalld zone Support

NetworkManager 1.26

NetworkManager 1.26 has been released as the latest stable series of this powerful and widely used network connection manager designed for the GNOME desktop environment.

Numerous GNU/Linux distributions ship with NetworkManager by default to allow users to manage network connections, whether they’re Wi-Fi or wired connections or VPN connections.

In NetworkManager 1.26, there’s now automatic connection for Wi-Fi profiles when all previous activation attempts fail. Previously, if a Wi-Fi profile failed to autoconnect to the network, the automatism was blocked.

Another cool new feature is a build option called firewalld-zone, which is enabled by default and lets NetworkManager install a firewalld zone for connection sharing. This also puts network interfaces that use IPv4 or IPv6 shared mode in this firewalld zone during activation.

The new firewalld-zone option is more useful on Linux systems that use the firewalld firewall management tool with the nftables backend. However, it looks like NetworkManager continues to use iptables for enabling masquerading and open the required ports for DHCP and DNS.

NetworkManager 1.26 also adds a MUD URL property for connection profiles (RFC 8520) and sets it for DHCP and DHCPv6 requests, support for the ethtool coalesce and ring options, support for “local” type routes beside “unicast,” support for several bridge options, and adds match for device path, driver and kernel command-line for connection profiles.

Support for OVS patch interfaces has been improved in this release, which introduces a new provider in the nm-cloud-setup component for Google Cloud Platform. This is useful to automatically detect and configure the host to receive network traffic from internal load balancers.

Among other noteworthy changes, the syntax was extended to ‘match’ setting properties with ‘|’, ‘&’, ‘!’ and ‘\’, raw LLDP message is now exposed on D-Bus and the MUD usage description URL, and team connections are now allowed to work without D-Bus.

New manual pages for the nm-settings-dbus and nm-settings-nmcli components have been introduced as well, along with support more tc qdiscs: tbf and sfq, as well as the ability for ifcfg-rh to handle 802-1x.pin properties and “802-1x.{,phase2-}ca-path” (fixes CVE-2020-10754).

Last but not least, NetworkManager now marks externally managed devices and profiles on D-Bus and highlight externally managed devices in nmcli. For Ethernet connections, NetworkManager now automatically resets the original autonegotiation, duplex and speed settings when deactivating the device.

NetworkManager 1.26 is available for download here, but it’s only the sources which needs to be compiled. Therefore, I strongly recommend that you update to this new stable version from the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution as it’s an important component.

Last updated 4 years ago

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