Re: Priority of network adapters

[Marcin Wołyniak <marcin wolyniak aster pl>]

Dnia Dan Williams 04.02.2009 18:06 napisał(a):
> On Wed, 2009-02-04 at 11:15 +0100, marcin.wolyniak wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > I see one annoying for me bahaviour of NM in my IBM T41 laptop. When I
> > start the machine ( cold or from hibernate ) with eth cable connected
> > and built-in wifi enabled NM chooses wifi connection first. Despite the
> > higher speed link exists ie eth0 to connect to. I have to manually
> > switch the connection to eth0 through NM applet.
>
> NM 0.6 or NM 0.7?  Both should be choosing the wired connection as the
> default as long as the DHCP server is returning a gateway, or as long as
> you've set a gateway manually if you're using static IP on the ethernet.

NM 0.7 in F9 or F10.

> Can you post some logs from /var/log/messages so we can figure out what
> NM thinks it's doing?  What specific NM RPM version is this with?
Currently:

NetworkManager-0.7.0-1.git20090102.fc10.i386

but NM behaves  like this at every RPM version from F9 and F10 for sure. 
(0.7 series). In F7 or F8 ( 0.6 series ) I do not remeber exactly.

> > More, it switches to wifi correctly when I disconnect eth cable, but
> > doesn't switch back to eth connection when i connect back the cable.
> >
> > Am I missing something in configuration or is it bug?
>
> Likely a bug.
>
> > Is it possible to arbitrary set priority of NICs the NetworkManager
> > uses?
>
> No, because that's not usually needed as long as there aren't any
> bugs :)
I asked for setting adapter priority, because I used it in IBM Access 
Connections manager under Win. I think it is worth to consider feature 
like this. Of course it is my user point of view.

Under IBM's manager I can set priority and "automate" conections 
switching. Let me point two situations I used IBM's manager:

- I can connect with cable at the highest priority, then I can connect 
through wifi usb card of IEEE 802.11g at lower priority, but when i 
disconnect this card I always can connect with built-in IEEE 802.11b 
card as a last resort. All automagically switching back and forth 
without making any mouse clicks.

- create sort of failover chain in machine with two (or more) cards. 
when link goes down on one card then net configuration switches in given 
way from one card to another. When link goes back to the highest 
priority card - then we are back in "default" config.

> > I use Fedora 10 now, but the same problem existed in previous Fedoras (
> > 7,8,9) I used. Selinux is enabled but disbling it doesn't have any
> > imapct on this NM behavior
>
> If you like, you can send /var/log/messages to me privately if you're
> concerned about something in the logs you'd rather not have public.

Log sent to You privately.

> Dan

--

Regards
Marcin