feat(live): Added new boot option "live.net_config_tui=1"

[lslezak]

Problem

• Manual network configuration using the dracut boot options is not easy

Solution

• Added new boot option live.net_config_tui=1 to interactively configure network settings using the nmtui tool.
• Additional features:
  • Allow configuring the HTTP proxy
  • Display the network configuration summary
  • Added network test button which tries connecting to www.suse.com to check that the network setup is correct.

Testing

• Tested manually

Notes

• It turned out that configuring the Wifi network is not possible because the drivers are missing in the initrd. In theory after adding the Wifi drivers (and firmware if required) it should be possible to configure also the Wifi cards and use them for downloading the self-updates.

Screenshots

The initial summary screen:

After pressing "Edit" button the nmtui tool is started

Then the user is asked to optionally configure the HTTP proxy:

Then the summary dialog is displayed again. After pressing the "Test connection" button a request to https://www.suse.com is sent and the result is displayed on the screen:

When the "Continue" button is pressed in the summary the boot process continues as usually.

A proof that the configured network proxy is used in the self-update step later:

[mvidner]

This is nice!
Regarding the name of the boot option, maybe we want to use live.net_config_tui=1 to say in what the point is, otherwise the name is IMHO too generic.

[teclator]

Apart of the already commented issue about missing WiFi drivers, I also miss some screen / view with the current devices, it allows you to add new connections or edit existing ones, you added the nmcli show screen which is nice, but if you try to edit the existing default connection which is not bind to an specific device and you want to assign it to some device you need to know in advance the interface names because it is an empty input.

There is also no devices list which allows you to generate a connection per device, but in general it looks good for adding or editing connections and also for setting the hostname and proxy.

[lslezak]

Thanks for the feedback!

I also miss some screen / view with the current devices

I updated the workflow to first display the summary and then allow changing the configuration.

[Martin-Weiss]

Just found this issue and it seems I need exactly this feature to "replace" what we have been doing in the past with this:

netsetup=hostip,gateway,nameserver netmask=255.255.255.0 gateway=10.1.1.1 nameserver=10.1.1.1 netwait=10

Would it be possible to implement this simlarly so that a user is just prompted for what we want and with pre-defined / prefilled content for the variables?

[lslezak]

Would it be possible to implement this simlarly so that a user is just prompted for what we want and with pre-defined / prefilled content for the variables?

Um, that would require to implement such tool from scratch, that's not trivial. The point here is that I basically just wrapped the nmtui and nmcli tools into a systemd service. This change is trivial and already provides quite a lot of needed functionality.

The network settings from the boot command line, like you used above, are still applied. E.g. if you use live.net_config_tui=1 nameserver=8.8.8.8 options then the nameserver value is used as a pre-configured value and you can still change it in the nmtui tool interactively. The only drawback is that the nmtui tool allows setting many options so it is more difficult to navigate there. But in general it does what you need.

Example with the live.net_config_tui=1 nameserver=8.8.8.8 boot options:

[teclator]

Looks good, maybe we could also a Devices button which list the devices available just showing the nmcli d output.

[lslezak]

Unfortunately the dialog tool does not allow adding more buttons, the maximum is 3. At least it is possible to change the default labels "OK", "Cancel" and "Help" to "Continue", "Edit" and "Test connection" (or whatever you need).

So I added the device list to the beginning of the summary.

[Martin-Weiss]

I guess there are even some further requirements for the installation media - we might need proxy settings and proxy authentication as well as ssl certificate trust before downloading the squashfs image and/or autoinstall control files in case self-signed certificates are used and the repos / internet etc. are only reachable via ssl-terminating proxy with authentication... but that comes after initial interactive network config at least for for IPv4 (ip/mask/gateway/dns-server/dns zone - search..)

One other thing - not sure if this is a bit out of scope, here - ntp-server - we also need time-sync in air-gapped scenarios in cases where we can not control the time in bios / firmware and where we do not have DHCP providing NTP server info.. not sure if that NTP thing is possible in nmtui? (otherwise SSL certificate validation will fail and timestamps in logs will be wrong)

[teclator]

LGTM

[lslezak]

not sure if that NTP thing is possible in nmtui?

No, the nmtui can only configure network devices/connections. The network services like NTP are not handled there.