[arch-general] Network configuration

[Dolan Murvihill]

Hi Yamakaky,

netctl, wpa_supplicant, and NetworkManager all manage your network interface
connections (your OSI layer 2 connections). dhcpcd and dhclient are DHCP
clients, responsible for automatically getting you an IP address (OSI layer 3).

More information about these tools can be found on the Arch Wiki:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wireless#Wireless_management

I prefer to use wpa_supplicant because it is very simple, and exposes much of
the low level stuff. I have heard that it can be annoying to maintain, but I
haven't reached that drawback yet. My strategy is to use the most minimal tool
available until I understand why it is better to use higher level tools.

I would like to move to NetworkManager because I run chronyd and want to bring
it online and offline as my Internet connection comes and goes, which
wpa_supplicant does not support AFAIK. But I haven't been able to get it to
work yet.

For my DHCP client I chose dhcpcd, for no particular reason.

Hope that helps.
Dolan

On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 10:39:34AM +0200, Yamakaky wrote:
> Hi all
> 
> I write you this mail because I'm a bit lost between all these network
> configuration tools available :
> 
>  - systemd-networkd
>  - dhcpcd service
>  - netctl
>  - wpa_supplicant
>  - NetworkManager/wicd
> 
> There is two profiles I use now : a laptop (wifi auto-discover and connect
> with gui tray and easy to add network, ethernet auto-connect) and a
> raspberry py server (low ressources, ethernet only, dhcp configured, config
> not often changed). Actually, I use nm on my laptop (it's much much better
> than wicd) and dhcpcd on my raspberry pi. What would you use and why ?
> 
> Additional question : it seems systemd-timesyncd requires systemd-networkd,
> is it true ?
> 
> Thanks
> Yamakaky