NetworkManager 1.38 Released with IPv6 and Wi-Fi Hotspot Improvements, More

NetworkManager 1.38

NetworkManager 1.38 has been released today as the latest stable version of this popular network manager graphical and command-line utility for GNU/Linux distributions.

Coming two and a half months after NetworkManager 1.36, the NetworkManager 1.38 release is here to further improve IPv6 support by preferring static IPv6 addresses from “ipv6.addresses” over addresses from DHCPv6 and preferring the first static IPv6 addresses from “ipv6.addresses” to make it consistent with IPv4.

NetworkManager 1.38 also improves support for Wi-Fi hotspots by automatically assigning a stable random channel number if one is not manually selected by the user, adds support for the “throw” route type, and improves connectivity checks when the check endpoint address resolves to multiple addresses.

This release also improves security by no longer accepting connections to WEP-encrypted Wi-Fi networks when using a recent wpa_supplicant version that’s built without WEP support and discouraging the use of insecure WEP encryptions for Wi-Fi networks in the nmcli command when activating or modifying a profile. In addition, NetworkManager no longer uses the unsupported SAE/WPA3 mode for AP mode.

Talking about nmcli, the command-line interface of NetworkManager, it was improved in this release by adding the ability to indicate missing Wi-Fi hardware when showing rfkill setting and adding a connection migrate command to allow you to move a profile to a specified settings plugin, which lets you convert deprecated profiles in the ifcfg-rh format to the keyfile format.

Among other noteworthy changes, NetworkManager now shortens too long hostnames received from DHCP to the first dot or to 64 characters (whatever comes first), adds a workaround for an issue where libcurl blocks NetworkManager while resolving DNS names, and fixes a bug when setting the priority for IP addresses.

Furthermore, NetworkManager now no longer advertises frequencies as supported if they are disallowed in configured regulatory domain, disables the WPA3 transition mode for wifi.key-mgmt=wpa-psk if the NIC doesn’t support Protected Management Frames (PMF), and sets the “src” attribute for DHCPv4 routes to the leased address to help with source address selection.

Last but not least, NetworkManager now manages Veth devices with the “eth*” name via the udev rule by default to support managing networks in LXD containers. You can download NetworkManager 1.38 right now from here if you fancy compiling on your GNU/Linux distribution or wait for it to arrive in the stable repositories to update your installation.

Last updated 2 years ago

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