#198 Improve Fedora interoperability between Ethernet and WiFi
Closed: Deferred to upstream 2 years ago by catanzaro. Opened 4 years ago by vondruch.

Given that Fedora Workstation is often used on laptops and switching work place from e.g. desk with docking station to meeting room is common scenario, it'd be desirable if the switching between Ethernet/WiFi is smoother. Having both interfaces enabled, these scenarios should work:

  1. Removing/inserting my LP into docking station and therefore having Ethernet (non) available, I'd be cool if the IRC client stayed connected and the opposite end have not noticed any difference. Currently, it appears as if the user disconnected and connected from other place.

  2. Having VPN connection enabled, it should not matter how LP is connected. The VPN should be correctly established and always preserved.

  3. Working with virtualization, no matter if Ethernet or WiFi is used, the virtual machine can access the outside network without reconfiguration.

There are examples [1, 2], which tries to address this issue, but I think this should be preconfigured and available out of the box.


Metadata Update from @catanzaro:
- Issue tagged with: meeting-request

3 years ago

Metadata Update from @catanzaro:
- Issue untagged with: meeting-request
- Issue tagged with: meeting

3 years ago

ACTION: Neal to involve NetworkManager developers in this ticket, determine feasibility

Metadata Update from @catanzaro:
- Issue untagged with: meeting
- Issue tagged with: pending-action

3 years ago

If I understand it correctly the mptcpd is something to consider in this context.

Metadata Update from @catanzaro:
- Issue assigned to ngompa

3 years ago

ACTION: Neal to involve NetworkManager developers in this ticket, determine feasibility

@ngompa you have an outstanding action item here.

I recently got in touch with the NetworkManager developers for another issue. I'll circle back with them on this one and have them take a look at this.

From a technical perspective: when an application connects to a socket, it uses one particular network interface. My computer has enp4s0 (ethernet), enp6s0 (second ethernet), wlp5s0 (wi-fi), virbr0 (virtual interface, I guess it's used by libvirt?), and sometimes tun0 or tun1 depending on how many VPN connections I have active. I guess(?) we could try creating virtual interface that forwards to the ethernet and wi-fi ones, so if an application connects via the virtual interface the connection could stay active regardless of whether the ethernet or wi-fi interface drops. But I'm not sure what we can do to force applications to use that desired virtual interface.

I guess NetworkManager would need to handle all of this, so I've asked a NetworkManager developer to look at this.

I don't think this issue is likely to be solved here, as this is a bit outside the scope of the sort of issues we normally resolve in the Workstation WG. My guess is that the best path forward here is to move this ticket to NetworkManager, and hope they're able to come up with something clever. We don't have the right expertise here in Workstation WG.

My guess is that the best path forward here is to move this ticket to NetworkManager

Want to create a ticket against NetworkManager, @vondruch ? I'm going to suggest that we leave this issue open, so we can track it from the workstation side, but I don't think that this is something we can fix ourselves.

Metadata Update from @catanzaro:
- Issue close_status updated to: Deferred to upstream
- Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)

2 years ago

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