Re: Priority of network interfaces

[Nic James Ferrier <nferrier@tapsellferrier.co.uk>]

Derek Broughton <news@pointerstop.ca> writes:

> Alexandre Rossi wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>> 
>>> the wireless interface before I get a connection. Is there any IF
>>> priority setting available in Debian? What I'd like to do is tell Debian
>>> to use the wired interface when both are available.
>> 
>> There are, as far as I know, three ways to do this :
>> - dirty hack to automatically ifdown wlan0 before eth0 goes up (using
>> pre-up stanzas in /etc/network/interfaces). There may be more
>> complicated things using a lockfile for example.
>> - using ifmetric to route traffic through the cable instead of the
>> wireless NIC. - using the bonding kernel driver as suggested[1] once to
>> prioritize the cable. I could not make it work with wpa_supplicant and
>> ipw2200 though, but in my view, it feels like the perfect setup for a
>> laptop.
>
> knetworkmanager - I don't know if it's available for Debian yet, but there's
> a version for Ubuntu.  With network-manager, the wired interface always
> takes precedence.  You may find, however, that it lacks enough features for
> your configuration - it's working well for me with two wired and two
> wireless networks.

I used ifmetric to solve this very problem, eg:

  iface eth0 inet static
     address ...
     metric 1

  iface eth1 inet static
     channel ...
     address ...
     metric 10

I don't know if there is a good gui that supports metrics. There
should be because metrics are kinda important.


Nic