brings up both wired and wireless interfaces; hard to pick just one through the UI

quite annoying, i agree.

is your wireless connection marked as "connect automatically" in connection-editor?

Yes, it is, because I want network-manager to connect to wireless automatically when I unplug the Ethernet cable.

ifconfig and route -n are attached. eth0 is Ethernet, eth1 is wireless. Note that network-manager has given both eth0 and eth1 (excluding the link-local route) the same metric.

This is a regression from previous behavior, which I got used to as the reporter mentions. Under Hardy/Gutsy, you only got one nm-managed interface brought up out of several available (wired and wireless), with wired preferred. When you unplug wired, it brings up wireless.

So, it's doing it for me too, it will connect all interfaces that are up at the same time if they all are checked as "connect automatically". That seems to be the default configuration after upgrade.

This just doesn't work for me as my wired and wireless networks are bridged and I have DHCP setup to give all MAC address (both wired ports or the wireless) on each laptop the same IP address.

An additional problem is that if both wired and wireless are enabled, the icon only indicates the status of the wired network, although I was connected to a (very weak) wireless connection.

I think bug 278485 is related. NM seems in general unable to handle well more than one connection at a time.

I notice the new Eject icons in nautilus' sidebar for removable devices and wonder if network manager's connection list could have something similar.

In many cases it's not so much annoying as wasting resources (there is absolutely no point to have two active connections to the same router). I think that the default (one active connection at a time, wired preferred) should be restored. Of course, there are situations when several connections should be active but for these not-so-usual cases a more sophisticated setup is necessary (e.g. order of precedence, what can work in parallel with with what and so on).

If someone knows a simple way to restore the old behavior, please share.

@ Dmik: Simple is a relative word, but here goes: The first workaround I did to restore 0.6 behavior was to add Hardy's repositories back into software sources, then use aptitude to downgrade all five related packages to 0.6.x and mark them Held at the older version. That worked fine, but it was annoying to have update-manager and synaptic keep telling me there were upgrades available to 0.7. Once I realized how many 0.7 bugs have been reported, and thus how long it is likely to be before I would want to try an allegedly fixed 0.7, I decided to just get the five binary .deb packages, unpack them, change the version numbers to 0.7+0.6.x, re-deb them, and install those "newer" packages. That worked fine too, but of course will be a problem as soon as 0.7 gets into a high enough version to supersede my 0.7+0.6.x versions. My full rant page on 0.7 vs 0.6 is http://www2.nau.edu/wal2/NetworkManager/Readme.html . Admittedly, my main problems were with the pptp plugin, but I confirm the specific issue(s) addressed by Bug 262152. There are dozens upon dozens of bugs reported for 0.7, some of which are being actively worked upon, some not, and some not confirmed. I wonder whether, for the bugs that ARE being worked on, is all of that work being coordinated and merged. I wonder if it is possible, and whether it would make any sense, to create a much more inclusive bug for 0.7 and start marking the dozens upon dozens of existing bugs as duplicates of the new all-inclusive bug. Each of those other bugs seems to be nibbling around the edges of the much larger problem. I wonder how much QA was done on 0.7 before it was decided to put it, rather than 0.6, into 8.10 Intrepid and 9.04 Jaunty.

William,

There's a simpler solution.

apt-get install wajig

wajig hold package

@jasonwc:
wajig worked. The held state is honoured by both update-manager and synaptic, which was exactly what I was looking for. And wajig is a very cool utility; I'll be installing it on ALL of my machines, whether I need to hold packages at specific versions or not.

I've updated my pptp rant documentation at:
http://www2.nau.edu/wal2/NetworkManager/Readme.html

There is a similar report of Fedora: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=454955
There the devs say it is intended behavior for NM to connect to all networks that are marked "auto connect".
However, I think there should be an option to only allow one connection at a time, with some priorities (eg. wired has more priority than wireless). There are clearly situations were you do not want to have two connections at the same time, like, eg., the one mentioned by Michael Milligan above. Moreover there is a cognitive issue because nm-applet doesn't seem to know what icon to display: a strenght meter or a wire; sometimes it is one and sometimes the other.

Yes, and in some cases it's the policy of the network administrator to strictly forbid connecting to both wired and wireless in the same building. If they are different subnets, you have the potential to act as a network bridge (yes I know this takes effort, but the potential is still there). We had several cases of folks getting their MAC's quickly banned when a dual connection was detected.

I understand the NM dev's position on the "auto connect"; that behavior was probably a major chunk of work (and is great!). However, we now have this regression. A quick solution would be to add an option to each connection to say something like "disable this connection when another is active"; then tick it for your wireless connection(s). Or, the reverse might make more sense: "disconnect all other connections when this is active", and tick it for wired. A more complete solution would be to have pools of connections, or locations, and add whatever connections you'd like active in the pool. Then, you connect to pools/locations instead of individual connections. Bonus, a hook could be provided to execute custom scripts on activation of each pool/location.

Maybe someone with time (i wish that was me) can patch NM, then Ubuntu might accept it and we can close this bug.

This fix didnt go in intrepid right?? when will this be fixed?

the routing issues with multiple devices should be fixed in jaunty.

This bug is still present in Jaunty.

Another issue in Jaunty is that there is an occasion where Jaunty will not
recognize a cross over cable.

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 11:07 PM, David S. <email address hidden> wrote:

> This bug is still present in Jaunty.
>
> --
> brings up both wired and wireless interfaces; hard to pick just one through
> the UI
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/262152
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of a duplicate bug.
>
> Status in “network-manager” source package in Ubuntu: Won't Fix
>
> Bug description:
> Binary package hint: network-manager
>
> network-manager 0.7 seems to like to bring up both my wired and wireless
> interfaces at the same time when possible. (Neither is configured in
> /etc/network/interfaces.) Unfortunately, if you do that on my network then
> you get what might charitably be described as random routing. I spent quite
> a while yesterday trying to figure out why my uploads kept on failing
> part-way through.
>
> As far as I can see, the only way to stop it from doing this through the UI
> is to disable wireless altogether, which I don't want to do. Selecting the
> wired interface in the applet's left-click menu doesn't disable wireless
> (i.e. it now seems to be a multiselect widget in some respects).
> network-manager 0.6 used to roam quite smoothly between wired and wireless
> when I inserted or removed the Ethernet cable, which was ideal. Now plugging
> in the Ethernet cable leaves wireless still running. For the meantime I'm
> running 'sudo ifconfig eth1 down' when I don't need wireless and 'sudo
> ifconfig eth1 up' when I do, but of course this is far from optimal.
>

Here is an easy fix. Put this script early in both /etc/network/if-up.d and /etc/network/if-down.d.

I actually like the new behaviour better, the old behaviour annoyed me because I often need to work with two active connections to different networks.

adsmith's script doesn't work on Precise so I've reworked it and removed the dependency on naming interfaces. My script will act whenever any "eth*" interface comes or goes. It also logs to "/var/log/NetworkManager.log".

Install to /etc/NetworkManager/prefer_wired_over_radio.sh

Once copied to that location do:

sudo chmod ug+x /etc/NetworkManager/prefer_wired_over_radio.sh
sudo ln -s /etc/NetworkManager/prefer_wired_over_radio.sh /etc/network/if-up.d/00prefer_wired_over_radio
sudo ln -s /etc/NetworkManager/prefer_wired_over_radio.sh /etc/network/if-post-down.d/00prefer_wired_over_radio

Watching the log-file whilst disconnecting and then reconnecting the wired interface will show something like this:

# tail -f /var/log/NetworkManager.log
2013-02-23-15:28:34 prefer_wired_over_radio eth0 NetworkManager stop post-down
2013-02-23-15:28:34 Re-enabling Wireless interfaces since wired went away
2013-02-23-15:28:42 prefer_wired_over_radio wlan0 NetworkManager start post-up
2013-02-23-15:28:52 prefer_wired_over_radio eth0 NetworkManager start post-up
2013-02-23-15:28:52 Disabling Wireless interfaces whilst wired is active
2013-02-23-15:28:52 prefer_wired_over_radio wlan0 NetworkManager stop post-down