Re: Default-Routing problems

[Colin Coombs <colin coombs cococon co uk>]

Following up to my previous post:

Here is an idea for an small enhancement to NetworkManager which would
solve my particular problem, and perhaps be generally useful for other
users with 'non-standard' use cases.

1. Define a new flag 'Local only' for each network connection. By
default, this flag is unset and does not affect the existing behaviour
of NetworkManager.

2. when NetworkManager is choosing which connection to use for the
default route, any connection with the 'Local only' flag set will not be
chosen.

A connection with this flag set can still be started automatically and
it will have a routing table entry for its particular IP subnetwork as
usual.

This flag should be set for any network connection that you are only
using to access local resources (e.g. printers and file shares). 

I know of cases where wired-Ethernet and WiFi connections are used in
this manner. I don't know if this flag would be sensible on GSM or CDMA
connections (but I suspect not).

By the way, I notice that Windows Vista detects whether a given WiFi
connection has internet access or not. I don't know how they detect
that, but I am not proposing the NetworkManager tries to do it -- a
manual setting is all I am asking for.

Any comments?