Re: nm-openvswitch on debian/ubuntu

[Thomas Haller <thaller redhat com>]

Hi,

On Wed, 2021-07-28 at 12:41 +0200, Sohaib E. wrote:
> Thank you for your quick answer.
>
> I have compiled NetworkManager's package myself but I still faced some
> issues deploying an ovs bridge. 
>
> Besides the NetworkManager-ovs.conf (openvswitch-switch.service instead
> of openvswitch.service), what other settings must be modified for this
> to work ?


I don't think anything else is missing.

Obviously, you need to create connection profiles, read `man nm-
openvswitch` about that ([1]). And, you'd activate the right profiles
(`nmcli connection up` and watch current setup with `nmcli device` and
`nmcli connection`).

Other than that, nothing comes to mind. As always when debugging
NetworkManager, enable level=TRACE logging and read the log. See [2]
for hints about logging.

Maybe the path to ovsdb's unix socket is different on the system? That
is currently a compile time constant. You should see that in the
logs...


[1] https://networkmanager.pages.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/nm-openvswitch.html
[2] 
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/-/blob/2d879c1ac5d907fe184898b23693fb8148363645/contrib/fedora/rpm/NetworkManager.conf#L27


best,
Thomas


> Thank you for your time,
> Sohaib
>
> Le mer. 28 juil. 2021 à 10:39, Thomas Haller <thaller redhat com> a
> écrit :
> > On Tue, 2021-07-27 at 18:39 +0200, Sohaib E. via networkmanager-list
> > wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > I'm trying to use Network Manager to deploy ovs bridges on
> > > debian/ubuntu. 
> > >
> > > I understand that Network Manager itself do not have such a feature
> > > and needs an additional plugin called nm-openvswitch. Nevertheless,
> > > this plugin is not available on debian/ubuntu and, therefore, I was
> > > wondering if there was any workaround to deploy ovs bridges using
> > > nmcli on ubuntu/debian or to install nm-openvswitch on
> > ubuntu/debian.
> >
> > nm-openvswitch is part of NetworkManager, but
> >
> > - it can be disabled/enabled at compile time
> >
> > - it is loaded from a shared library (dlopen), so it can be packaged
> > separately (as done on Fedora, with NetworkManager-openvswitch
> > package). But it doesn't have to be packaged separately, Debian tends
> > to put all these device plugins in the same "network-manager"
> > package,
> > while Fedora tends to split them (NetworkManager-
> > {wifi,team,wwan,...}).
> >
> >
> > Debian builds with this code disabled. You would either have to
> > convince the debian maintainers to package this, or build
> > NetworkManager yourself. In the latter case, you could just rebuild
> > the
> > debian package with minor changes to the build settings.
> >
> >
> > best,
> > Thomas