CentOS 7 on Raspberry Pi 3 disabling NetworkManager.service and enabling network.service

Question

I'm working on setting up a raspberry Pi 3 with CentOS 7. In particular this image: http://buildlogs.centos.org/centos/7/isos/armhfp/CentOS-Userland-7-armv7hl-Minimal-1602-RaspberryPi3.img.xz

The image comes with Network Manager enabled and network.service attempts to startup by default. Unfortunately, network.service fails to start. Relevant command and output:

$ systemctl -l status network.service
● network.service - LSB: Bring up/down networking
    Loaded: loaded (/etc/rc.d/init.d/network)
    Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Thu 1970-01-01 00:00:15 UTC; 46 years 5 months ago
      Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
    Process: 582 ExecStart=/etc/rc.d/init.d/network start (code=exited, status=6)

Jan 01 00:00:15 FQDN systemd[1]: Starting LSB: Bring up/down networking...
Jan 01 00:00:15 FQDN systemd[1]: network.service: control process exited, code=exited status=6
Jan 01 00:00:15 FQDN systemd[1]: Failed to start LSB: Bring up/down networking.
Jan 01 00:00:15 FQDN systemd[1]: Unit network.service entered failed state.
Jan 01 00:00:15 FQDN systemd[1]: network.service failed.

The connection (via dhcp over interface eth0) is working fine because it's currently controlled by Network Manager but I need to disable Network Manager and control eth0 using network.service (for legacy reasons).

After stopping and disabling NetworkManager, network.service still fails and I receive the same output as above, and as a result, I'm still unable to reach the internet.

This is the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file used while running NetworkManager:

DEVICE="eth0"
BOOTPROTO="dhcp"
HWADDR=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
NM_CONTROLLED="yes"
ONBOOT="yes"

This is the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file used while running network.service (when NetworkManager has been stopped and disabled):

DEVICE="eth0"
BOOTPROTO="dhcp"
ONBOOT="yes"
HWADDR=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx

Here is some more possibly useful information:

Relevant output from journalctl:

$ journalctl -xe
Unit network.service has begun starting up.
Jun 21 20:30:23 FQDN systemd[1]: network.service: control process exited, code=exited status=6
Jun 21 20:30:23 FQDN systemd[1]: Failed to start LSB: Bring up/down networking.
-- Subject: Unit network.service has failed
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
--
-- Unit network.service has failed.
--
-- The result is failed.
Jun 21 20:30:23 FQDN systemd[1]: Unit network.service entered failed state.
Jun 21 20:30:23 FQDN systemd[1]: network.service failed.

Any suggestions would be wonderful!

Answer 1

After digging through the /etc/rc.d/init.d/network startup script, I found that exit 6 can be caused by not having a /etc/sysconfig/network file. I was missing said file. Once I created that file with contents:

NETWORKING="yes"

network.service started correctly.