I recently acquired a managed switch for my home office in order to segment a few devices off onto their own isolated vlan. As part of this, I want to expose these vlans on my desktop using Open vSwitch (OVS), and I wanted to implement the configuration using NetworkManager rather than either relying on the legacy /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts scripts or rolling my own set of services. These are my notes in case I ever have to do this again.

Introduction A long time ago, I wrote an article all about OpenStack Neutron (which at that time was called Quantum). That served as an excellent reference for a number of years, but if you’ve deployed a recent version of OpenStack you may have noticed that the network architecture looks completely different. The network namespaces previously used to implement routers and dhcp servers are gone (along with iptables rules and other features), and have been replaced by OVN (“Open Virtual Network”).

Recent releases of Raspbian have adopted the use of dhcpcd to manage both dynamic and static interface configuration. If you would prefer to use the traditional /etc/network/interfaces mechanism instead, follow these steps. First, disable dhcpcd and wpa_supplicant. systemctl disable –now dhdpcd wpa_supplicant You will need a wpa_supplicant configuration for wlan0 in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant-wlan0.conf. If you already have an appropriate configuration in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf, you can just symlink the file: cd /etc/wpa_supplicant ln -s wpa_supplicant.

A question that crops up regularly on #docker is “How do I attach a container directly to my local network?” One possible answer to that question is the macvlan network type, which lets you create “clones” of a physical interface on your host and use that to attach containers directly to your local network. For the most part it works great, but it does come with some minor caveats and limitations.

On IRC – and other online communities – it is common to use a “pastebin” service to share snippets of code, logs, and other material, rather than pasting them directly into a conversation. These services will typically return a URL that you can share with others so that they can see the content in their browser. One of my favorite pastebin services is termbin.com, because it works from the command line using tools you probably already have installed.