No ability to set accept_ra nor allow-hotplug

[chmduquesne]

Hi,

As far as I can see, this role does not let me set the option accept_ra. In the case of ipv6, it would be nice if it let me.

Also, you can only declare an interface as 'auto', but not as 'allow-hotplug'. For non pci interfaces this would be useful.

Cheers,
Christophe-Marie

[tersmitten]

I think that you are right. Can you open a pull request?

[chmduquesne]

I don't think I can make changes that are backward-compatible. The first problem, as far as I can see, is that currently network_interfaces_interfaces.{n}.auto is a boolean. Here I assume that you refer to auto as in the interface selection stanza, as in

auto eth0

or

allow-hotplug eth1

There is also another interface selection stanza, no-auto-down:

no-auto-down eth2

AFAIU, it can be combined with another selection stanza for the same interface, so you can have these 2 non exclusive stanzas:

allow-hotplug eth2
no-auto-down eth2

So really, this boolean should be dropped, and instead of having network_interfaces_interfaces.{n}.auto=True|False, we should have network_interfaces_interfaces.{n}.when, defaulting to [], which would describe the situations in which the system should have this interface up, and that would be a list of elements that are are auto|allow-*|no-auto-down rather than a key. This is further confusing, because 'auto' can also be used as a method to bring an inet6 interface up:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet6 auto
    dhcp 1
    accept_ra 2

Also, lots of other options keywords have been left out: accept_ra is one, but then there is privext, dhcp (as an option, not as a method to bring the interface up as in iface eth0 inet6 dhcp), request_prefix, ll-attempts, ll-interval, hwaddress... To name only a few out of the many many possibilities. I invite you to read https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/ifupdown/interfaces.5.en.html for an exhaustive list.

Now I am a complete beginner with ansible (I have never written a role nor a template). But IIUC, instead of listing all the possibilities explicitly, it would maybe be more productive to simplify the template device.j2 to something like:

iface {{ item.device }} {{ item.family | default('inet', true) }} {{ item.method | default('dhcp', true) }}
{% for key in item.keys() %}
{%   if key not in ['bridge', 'subnet', 'pre-up', 'up', 'down', 'post-down'] %}
  {{ key }} {{ item[key] }}
{%   endif %}
{% endfor %}

I am ok to write a PR, but since this is potentially a lot of work for me, I want to make sure that you would be ok with my changes before I invest the time and energy.