On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 10:04 -0800, Joe Barnett wrote: > A co-worker was showing me the neat way that windows XP deals with > mutiple connections. Instead of bringing connections up and down as > cables get plugged in/waps get too far away/etc, all interfaces are > brought up whenever they can be connected. So, for example, a laptop > with wireless, ethernet, and a bluetooth/gprs connection will have 3 > interfaces up. The routing table is set up such that all 3 routes > exist, but have different metrics. So (hyptothetically) the ethernet > will have a metric of 0, the wlan 20, and the bluetooth 60. When a > packet is routed, it chooses the route with the lowest metric. This > means that instead of losing connection, and then having to wait for a > new connection, the network connection just gets re-routed to the next > lowest metric connection without a break in connectivity (or at least > with a noticably shorter break). > > 2 questions: > > 1) can routes in linux be set up this way? (I've only seen metrics of > 0 when i run the route command, man route says the metric is not used > by recent kernels...)
Not sure... if the kernel doesn't use it, I wonder what the kernel _does_ use. In our case, its not worth having an entry for a device in the routing table if there's no connection, but given a valid IP connection on a device, we could give the "fastest" device the first routing table entry with "0.0.0.0", to make the kernel default to that device for all packets. > 2) would it make sense for NM to try to do things this way? It certainly would provided we can get the desired behavior of metrics (if the kernel does use it) by playing around iwth routing table entry order. Dan _______________________________________________ NetworkManager-list mailing list NetworkManager-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/networkmanager-list
