Network Configuration Guide

Devuan chimaera includes a number of tools for network management, including the traditional command line oriented ifupdown package as well as the daemon based active managers connman and network-manager. The latter is commonly used on desktop installations as it comes with an easy-to-use GUI.

Devuan chimaera does not include wicd which due to its dependency on python2.7 has been excluded from the Debian buster repositories.

Using ifupdown

The ifupdown package provides command line administration of network interfaces based on declarations added to /etc/network/interfaces, or added as snippet files in /etc/network/interfaces.d/.

Interfaces are managed via command line programs ifup and ifdown, and (as applicable) via hotplug and boot up scripts.

Below is a small collection of example configuration snippets for ifupdown.

• Standard DHCP cable setup

  auto eth0
  iface eth0 inet dhcp

• Standard DHCP wireless setup

  auto wlan0
  iface wlan0 inet manual
      wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
  iface default inet dhcp

  This setup expects wpa_supplicant.conf to contain the lines

  ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
  update_config=1
  p2p_disabled=1

  and that the user is in group netdev.
  Access points administration is done by editing of wpa_supplicant.conf, either manually using a text editor, by using wpa_cli commands on the command line or in a desktop setting, by using the wpa_gui graphical tool (from package wpagui).

• Hotplug DHCP cable setup

  allow-hotplug eth0
  iface eth0 inet dhcp

  Note that with this setup a system with initrd boot may find that a new address is assigned at times, since the dhcp client starts without its cache file being available and therefore it cannot propose to use the previous IP address.

• Standard DHCPv6 cable setup

  auto eth0
  iface eth0 inet6 dhcp

• Standard static address cable setup

  auto eth0
  iface eth0 inet static
      address 10.1.1.5/24
      gateway 10.1.1.1

• Manual single DHCP wireless setup

  allow-hotplug wlan0
  iface wlan0 inet dhcp
      wpa-ssid myssid
      wpa-psk mypassphrase

  Note that myssid and mypassphrase are place holders to be replaced with the actual strings.

• Manual multiple mixed wireless setup

  auto wlan0
  iface wlan0 inet manual
      wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
  
  iface default inet dhcp
  
  iface at_home inet static
      address 10.10.10.7/24
      gateway 10.10.10.1

  Note that at_home is here a place holder for the "id_str" string that previously has been associated with the access point definition in wpa_supplicant.conf.
  Thus, this setup will use dhcp by default for wireless access points, and the static address configuration for any access point that is identified as "at_home".

Using connman

The connman package provides an automatic network managing daemon program that is controlled on the command line via its connmanctl control program.

A couple of examples from its "man page":

• Configuring a static IP from the command line

  $ connmanctl config wifi_100ba9d170fc_666f6f626172_managed_psk ipv4 manual 192.168.1.101 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1

• Changing the IP back to dhcp

  $ connmanctl config wifi_100ba9d170fc_666f6f626172_managed_psk ipv4 dhcp

Note that connman uses its own interface names.

Using network-manager

A desktop system may use network-manager for managing some or all of the network interfaces. The package also includes the nmcli program for command line administration, but this cannot be installed without the graphical dependencies.