14 DAY TRIAL // NetworkManager, the open-source network management tool used by default in numerous GNU/Linux distributions for allowing users to connect to various wired, wireless or mobile network connections, was updated to version 1.8.0.
NetworkManager 1.8 is a major release that introduces numerous improvements and new features over the NetworkManager 1.6 series. Prominent ones include more flexible configurations for hostname management, as well as support for more route options like mtu, lock-mtu, initrwnd, lock-initrwnd, cwnd, lock-cwnd, tos, window, lock-window, pref-src, src, initcwnd, and lock-initcwnd.
The nmcli component has been updated in this release to be able to produce more machine parsing-friendly output, new "driver:" device specification was implemented in NetworkManager.conf to support matching of networking devices, the ability to handle PINs for PKCS#11 tokens as secrets was added, and EAP-FAST support in wpa_supplicant was improved.
An MTU property was added for both CDMA and GSM connections, a new option allows users to disable selected TLS versions during EAP phase 1 authentication, and it looks like it's finally possible to configure the 802.1x authentication timeout for a faster fallback to other available network connections. NetworkManager 1.8 also removes libgudev as a dependency.
NetworkManager now better handles externally managed devices
Among other noteworthy improvements that landed in the NetworkManager 1.8 stable series of the open-source network connection management tool, we can mention support for creating and managing dummy links, support for attaching user-data in the form of key-value pairs to network connection profiles, and the ability to set a hardcoded MAC address to teaming devices.
NetworkManager is now also capable of exposing the SRIOV capability of a device on D-Bus, allow users to configure a number of virtual functions in NetworkManager.conf, as well as modify bonding devices on-the-fly without having to restart the connection. It also replaces libsoup with libcurl for connectivity checking for a smaller dependency footprint.
The new release also implements a persist managed state for a network device to improve the seamless takeover of another device that was previously managed after restart, and it now penalizes those default routes that failed connectivity checks with a higher metric. Better error responses are now sent to the nmcli command when a connection fails to activate.
Failures to change the MAC address during network scanning are better handled in NetworkManager 1.8, which won't write /etc/resolv.conf as a symlink file already exists when the DNS mode is set as "rc-manager=symlink." The automatic MAC address for Bonding devices is now more predictable, and NetworkManager 1.8 disables Reverse Path filtering in multihoming configurations.