Network Manager Gnome Wifi sharing not portable

Question

I set this up succesffully using the network-manager-gnome gui to share the wifi to the ethernet (with DCHP) and it seems to work well on my Pi - I can connect and access the WAN when I have a Wifi connection,but will get an assigned IP even if I dont has an active wifi connection on the Pi. That means I can VNC in and join a Wifi network - all good.

However when I send an SD card image to someone as part of a workflow I have created with the Pi, they cannot connect through the ethernet as I do - the DCHP sharing connection part does not allocate an address to the connected device. I suspect the network-manager-gnome ethernet sharing is tied to the specific mac address of the ethernet device and not just eth0. Any idea how to make this portable? I need the recipient of the image to have it just work when they plug it in, as they will have little to no linux experience.

I have verified that all the hardware is working their end.

Many thanks

Answer 1

Why are you using networkmanager?

It is, of course, possible to replace dhcpcd (which is the default for Raspbian) with networkmanager, but getting support to work in the GUI is far from straightforward,.

Debian uses predictable network interface names by default (these can be used in Raspbian, but are not default).

networkmanager normally requires configuration for each MAC and is not really portable between installations - indeed the concept of moving whole OS between systems is unusual - even if common for Raspbian users; even then predictable network interface names preclude this.

Ubuntu MATE installations which use networkmanager are not portable between Pi systems (although it is possible to configure them to run on multiple systems).

Frankly, I think dhcpcd works as well as networkmanager, but is easier to configure.

If you want to manually configure NetworkManager it stores its configuration files in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections, but this is far from straightforward.

My tutorial How to set up networking/WiFi explains how to setup networking using dhcpcd, but other than setting up /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf (which can be done from the GUI) little is actually needed.