Using network-manager-gnome to bridge eth0 and wlan0

[firenice03]

@firenice
Nice find, You win the "Google Gold Badge of the day"

Thanks!!!! and a shout out to my keyboard and mouse for making it possible..

[wnl]

Yes firenice03, you have indeed hit on the information I have been trying to explain over and over again. Notice the similarity between your link's image





and the one I posted before. And Wirezfree is indeed correct, Linux Lite is based on the earlier version of Ubuntu.

Now, today I tried to upgrade the network-manager and network-manager-gnome packages to the latest and greatest in the Ubuntu repositories, but that failed as I sort of expected it would. (It's not clear to me exactly how one determines when it's okay to update/upgrade packages; I was just going by the higher version numbers.)

But all of this still leaves a bunch of questions. As I understand it, the bridging was added long ago, way before the version which is shipped with Linux Lite. If I have the bridge option appearing in this old version, why doesn't it have a way of activating it. I believe there probably was a different way of achieving the on/off switching that you see in the image above. Nobody would have shipped the software the way it seems to operate in our version. I think there is something wrong in the version of nm-applet we have because it also behaves differently from any of the several others I have run. I may try another from a different desktop environment (and/or windows manager), can't one configure some optional ones such as KDE and the like for the desktop? I'm not any better versed in the panel applet interoperability problem than the package revision problem.

You guys have been great to hang in with me for so long on this challenge. I'll try a little more messing around with it. Then I think tonight or tomorrow I may give the command-line/configuration-file method a try or two just to see if I can get it to work.

[firenice03]

More digging... So yes my Network Manager has the option to add a bridge but doesnt seem to activate or show in the command..

Code:

ifconfig

I did get it to show after the following command:

Code:

sudo /sbin/ifconfig bridge0 up

I may not have my settings exact but CLOSER????

[Wirezfree]

@wnl
I guess you have a dilemma, but options, I guess it's down to priorties/needs..??
> If you need it "now" and "all the time", switch to Ubuntu 15.04, follow the link provided by firenice03
> If you like LL, and want to stick with it, Install 15.04, and run LL in Virtualbox, and just let 15.04 host run the bridge for now.
> Dual boot 15.04 with LL, and use it when needed.

I can only assume, given it's in 15.04, it will make it in to 16.0 LTS next year,
LL 3.0 will be based on 16.0, so it should be in LL.

@Jerry
Am I assuming in-correctly..??

[wnl]

Gentlemen, we have liftoff!

Thank you both for your patience, knowledge, and research.

When I changed the last line in /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf to enable it to deal with the interfaces, the bridge and the slave  interfaces automatically came up before I could even reboot. That is, I changed the last line here from "managed=false" to "managed=true".
____
[main]
plugins=ifupdown,keyfile,ofono
dns=dnsmasq

no-auto-default=C8:9CC:A9:C1:70,26:AB:81:7B:89:AE,

[ifupdown]
managed=false
_____

firenice03, it was trying out your command that made me think to look into it with nmcli d show a little closer, it revealed that the bridge was not being managed.

Wirezfree, I really respect your ability to think out of the box. Who would have thought about using virtual machines in such an arrangement, very clever. But obviously, I won't have to go down that path.

They say that the linux community is full of people willing to help, you two have shown this to be true. Thanks again and goodnight.

[firenice03]

Glad to hear you got it working!! And thanks for the kind words

I'll be bookmarking this one for sure!!

[wnl]

:-\

Update: Although the testbed with two Ethernet NICs did work (and perhaps just accidentally at that), applying the same strategy to the netbook where one of the interfaces is wlan0 did NOT work. At least not yet. It did  bring up the bridge and connect to the wired side but would never try or complete getting the wireless side connected. I may look further into this.

One thing to be aware of, it is  necessary to trigger the daemon (NetworkManager) to poll its state and/or refresh things by invoking touch /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf. while  experimenting; you must have the proper (or root) privilege to do this. I saw elsewhere  someone was editing the file with null changes to accomplish this, evidently they didn't know about the touch command.

[Wirezfree]

@wnl
Yes the LL community(IMHO) is the best.


O.K on the initial eth <> eth success, progress


Regarding the situation now with eth <> wifi mmm
Could it be something unrelated..??
I had a WiFi connection that would go to sleep frequently,
and sometimes not wake up, so would loose the connection
first I updated the driver, then do a cron job every 1hr to do:

Code:

service network-manager restart

since then never had an issue.


EDIT:
Should have given more detail.
I installed gnome-scheduler from synaptic, that gives you Scheduler in the System menu.
If you run it this way from menu tasks are only run as "normal user".


But if you open a terminal and do:

Code:

gksu gnome-scheduler

It now run's as root, so anything you now schedule this way run's with root privileges.
If you open Scheduler from the menu, you do not see the root tasks.

[wnl]

Thanks for the info on the task scheduler, I've been wanting something like that.

[N4RPS]

Hello!

I have a second router here as a repeater. It has ports I can plug Ethernet cables into if I want. It's a Linksys WRT54G running DD-WRT. The down side is that anything connected to it - wireless or otherwise - is limited to 1/2 of your regular speed. Is something like THIS what you want to do?

73 DE N4RPS
Rob