Wicd should allow for configuration of network metric

[Loye Young]

Wicd should allow for configuration of network metric.

We ship computers with both wired and wireless interfaces. Ifupdown manages the wired interface, and wicd manages the wireless interface.

All works well, except when both interfaces create default routes, both with metric equal to 0. (The metric setting breaks the tie between multiple default routes.) For the wired connection, we simply add the metric argument in /etc/network/interfaces. Because wicd doesn't allow for configuring the metric, we set the eth0 metric to 1 in order to break the tie. E.g.,

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
    metric 1

However, since the wired connection is much faster, we'd rather set the metric for eth0 to 0 and the metric for the wireless connection to 1, which would provide the best of all worlds.

A relatively simple fix is for wicd to provide an optional metric setting, which would be passed to ifmetric.

It would require a dependency to ifmetric, but there's not a downside to that AFAIK.

Happy Trails,

Loye Young
Isaac & Young Computer Company
Laredo, Texas
http://www.iycc.net

[Dan O'Reilly (oreilldf)]

Is there any advantage that ifmetric provides over just using "ifconfig metric"?

[Loye Young (loyeyoung)]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 8:10 PM, Dan O'Reilly <email address hidden> wrote:
>Is there any advantage that ifmetric provides over just using "ifconfig
>metric"?

Yes. Ifconfig metric sets the metric for the interface. Ifmetric tells the
networking stack what to do with that information.

Happy Trails,

Loye Young
Isaac & Young Computer Company
Laredo, Texas
http://start.iycc.net

[David Paleino (dpaleino)]

Hello Loye,

I'm investigating this bug for inclusion in the upcoming 1.7.3 release.

Could you please clarify the difference between "ifmetric" and "ifconfig metric"? Googling a bit, I saw no difference, apart from "ifmetric" being recommended more than once.

[Wouter Valk (wvalk)]

Hello David,

As far as i know ifmetric allows you to define the metric attribute in /etc/network/interfaces which in his turn probably runs ifconfig metric.

Like Loye said eth0 is mutch faster than wlan or even wwan so allowing wlan to define a metric would be great