Re: multiple-device questions

[Jerry Vonau <jvonau shaw ca>]

Dan Williams wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-05-15 at 02:12 -0600, Andrew Jorgensen wrote:
> > What are the plans for UI for controlling multiple-device behavior?
>
> There's an applet re-write on the table for 0.7.1.   The current
> menu-based design pretty much falls over for multiple devices.
>
> > Right now nm-applet just connects to all networks that have automatic
> > configurations.  This is potentially confusing.  A few people have filed
> > bugs or asked questions on this list.
>
> Right; though this isn't so much different than current networking
> systems.  If you want complete manual control of your connecitons, then
> you don't mark those connections as "autoconnect", and then you get to
> manually activate and deactivate those connections as you see fit.
>
> > If the fastest device does not have a gateway defined (none offered by
> > DHCP, link-local only, or none configured in static config) will NM
> > choose a slower device for the default route?
>
> Yes.
>
> > What signaling is given the listeners (like Pidgin or Evolution) when a
> > device goes down but there are other devices up?
>
> As Tambet said, there are two mechanisms:
>
> a) Simple overall network state such as DISCONNECTED, CONNECTING, and
> CONNECTED, which is a composite of all the current device states.  If at
> least one device is connected and there is a default route, the state
> will be CONNECTED.
>
> b) The ActiveConnection API.  Each current connection has an
> ActiveConnection object which clients can use to figure out the state of
> individual network connections and devices.  Each active connection has
> one or more devices assigned to it, and a device cannot be assigned to
> more than one active connection.  It's important to remember that NM
> deals with _connections_, not really individual devices, though NM does
> provide state for individual devices as well.
>
> > Is the signaling different when it's the default route (or not) that has
> > gone down?
>
> Yes; you get org.freedesktop.DBus.PropertyChanged signals for the
> ActiveConnection objects when their 'default' property changes.  Only
> one ActiveConnection object will have a True 'default' property, and
> that is the connection that has the default route.

That is my issue at the moment, you can't have 2 different isp's default 
gateways active at the same time without intervention. I'm testing with 
2 wired nic's connected to the same LAN, if I do a ping/traceroute 
stating the interface to use, only the one that has the gateway will 
reach the internet. I have to issue an "ip route replace table main 
nexthop via <gw> dev eth0 nexthop via <gw2> dev eth1" in order to have 
both gateways active at the same time. I have not read though all the 
source yet, got some pointers to the code involved, and I'll see what I 
can come up with.

Jerry