Re: howto disable default multiple device activation?

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2008-11-25 at 09:50 +0100, Nikolaus Filus wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> with the switch to Intrepid I finally got the long awaited NM 0.7 features and
> although it incorporates several enhancements I would really like to set it back
> to the 0.6 behaviour of 1 active (physical) device.

Note that this behavior would prohibit Internet connection sharing and
instant failover when you pull the cable or whatever.

> My current current use case is:
> 
> office - work on ethernet only
> suspend, go home
> home - work wireless only
> suspend, visit girl friend
> home2 - work wireless only
> ...
> 
> After every resume NM seems very confused about its location and shows a lot of
> old entries in the applet. Sometimes I see SSIDs from all 3 locations in the

The old entries are sent from the supplicant or the kernel driver.  I
have verified that NetworkManager itself correctly clears the scan list
of the device when it is told to sleep, and that on resume when it
queries the supplicant for scan results, it gets a lot of older ones.
So this bug is elsewhere.

> list and although I'm already connected to ethernet NM tries to associate with
> an old SSID, times out and prompts for a new WPA key.
> 
> I tried to disable automatic connection to known networks, but I didn't find a
> switch for "exclusive connection" - this way is annoying, as I would have to
> redo this for every new network. I'm looking for a global "1 physical only,
> prefer wired over wireless".

Again, exclusive active device prohibits some key features of
NetworkManager 0.7, and most of the time shouldn't be a problem.  I
think the annoying behavior you're seeing is simply a bug in the
supplicant or driver that needs to be fixed, not a symptom of multiple
device support.

Dan