Consequences of Network Manager installation for use with Home Assistant docker container

I've seen this thread here: Network-manager where someone asked about installing network-manager in OMV and the reply was very clear: "Installing network-manager is a bad idea since OMV manages the network settings. Installing packages from sid is generally a bad idea as well."

At the moment I have set up an OMV installation in Virtualbox and set it up with Portainer and Docker, OMV Extras and a couple of attached virtual hard drives for testing and it's all working very well.

As an experiment, I wanted to see how a Home Assistant docker container would run on OMV so I set it up using the manual "supervised" installation commands.

Part of the installation is that it requires network-manager so I took a snapshot on the virtual machine as a precaution and installed network-manager using sudo apt, bearing the above warnings in mind. To my surprise, everything seems to work fine after install. I even changed the IP address of the machine using the OMV interface and there are no apparent problems.

Now I have no doubt that installing network-manager on OMV is generally a bad idea since I'm guessing it uses it's own networking system/settings but wanted to ask if anyone could explain more abot what kind of issues it would cause and specifically and if there are ways to meet the requirements of Home Assistant with network-manager installed while also keeping OMV problem free? I don't notice any issues with my test installation now, but I suspect problems could arise in future with network-manager installed?

Zitat von ryecoaaron

I am very curious why something in a container cares about network-manager outside of a container...

Other than the fact network-manager is terrible on anything other than a laptop, you can install network-manager but don't use the network tab in OMV. If you use both, it will configure things with netplan along side of your network-manager.

As for the using packages from sid, you will learn soon why you shouldn't do that. It is called unstable for a reason.

Thanks for explaining and letting me know about the potential issues with network-manager. I think Home assistant uses network-manager installed on the host system to manage the networking settings it uses and requires even though it runs as a collection of Docker containers due to it's functionality on the network.

If I do run Home Assistant on Docker on OMV (not sure I'll go this route yet), I'll have to think carefully about how to manage network settings. As I said though, I updated the IP address of OMV from within the OMV settings after I had installed network-manager and it seemed to handle it fine. I wonder if there's a way to set this up so that Home Assistant is happy with network-manager installed but it doesn't interfere with OMV networking settings - probably not!

I'm not sure I'll use Home Assistant running on Docker on OMV - it might be better to keep it running on my Raspberry Pi4 as a self contained dedicated system but I did like the idea of having OMV basically run everything I needed all in one place.

As far as I'm aware, I'm not using packages from sid so no problems there.

Zitat von BebeMischa

As i read this, and more topics, it has been a good choice to keep OMV living on one machine and HA on another machine. Next to each other, as a good friends with each it's own life

Very probably what I'll do! But it is appealing to have everything running on one system.

Zitat von geaves

When I read this thread initially and after ryecoaaron post I decided to do some research, Network Manager is only necessary when using Supervisor as this uses Network Manager on the host to configure networking for add-ons, information is here

Surely if Home Assistant was being used in Docker, then to use Supervisor one could deploy Macvlan, by using a Macvlan config within the Docker container configuring networking for Supervisor and add-ons would be straight forward.

Interesting. I looked up Macvlan as I've never seen it mentioned before. Certainly looks like a possible route to take in setting things up although the learning curve to use it is prohibitive for me at the moment. I think overall, I'll probably keep Home Assistant on the Pi4 it's currently running on since it separates out that fairly important functionality to a dedicated device.

What I'm still curious about though is what actions I can take on OMV with network settings changes using the OMV UI before breaking something with network-manager installed. I've changed the system IP address with no obvious issues.

I'm not sure exactly what OMV uses to manage and set networking settings and how this responds to network-manager being installed? Do they access and change the same centralised system settings? Are they both active at the same time? Are the potential problems mostly from settings being changed by network-manager which OMV isn't aware of and vice versa? In which case, I'm guessing a misconfiguration could be fairly easily fixed. I'm not trying to make a bad idea work here - I'm just curious as to the technicalities in how OMV and network-manager could conflict.

I've got OMV installed in a VM working very well so I'll do some experiments with network settings (with snapshots!) and see if I can break things and figure out why.

Zitat von ryecoaaron

It really depends on what you are trying to do. If you have an ip set in network-manager and then you set the same ip in the OMV web interface, obviously it will keep doing the right thing but both will be doing it. If you have it set to dhcp, it is possible you could get two dhcp address.

OMV uses netplan and systemd-networkd.

Neither knows nor cares about the other one. It is possible to control network-manager with netplan but OMV does not.

Somewhat. They are both affecting the same network adapters but that is where it ends.

Yes.

You really don't want to continue to use both. Pick one.

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Thanks for answering each of my questions. It makes a lot more sense now on how with network-manager installed, there would effectively be two systems controlling the same network adapters. The whole thing is fascinating to me as I get more familiar with Linux, learning the ropes and try to setup the "ultimate system", currently with OMV running the show so appreciate you clarifying things.

I looked up Netplan and was interested to see that it supports both Systemd-networkd and NetworkManager as "renderers". My brain can't help but wonder if the Netplan files OMV generates/uses (abstracted network settings in YAML format from the look of it?) can be "applied" to network-manager. I suppose I've answered my own question - they can't since then it could/would overwrite settings that Home Assistant needs. Just thinking out loud and something that's clearly a pointless pursuit in practice. I certainly don't want to take up any more of anyone's time with this as the answers so far are clear. Sometimes I need to know when to stop! As mentioned, I'll now almost certainly keep Home Assistant on my Pi4.

Thanks again!