Sir I am from India. Currently I have two ways of Connecting to internet ie., I am using two broadband connections they are Hathaway broadband and airtel broadband through two ethernet cards one is built into motherboard and another external.
I am able to browse internet using any of the above connections. The issue is Hathaway broadband is frequently disconnecting and airtel broadband is providing services without interruption.
Hathaway is providing data download at very low cost and airtel is providing data download at very high cost.
I am using openSUSE12.3 as my operating system. When I issued the command ifconfig it is showing message as Hathaway is assigned to eth0 and airtel is assigned to eth1.
I want to achieve the following goals
1)when I download any file the system must use Hathaway ie., eth0
2)when the Hathaway broadband disconnects the system must immediately switch to airtel broadband ie., eth1
3)when again the Hathaway broadband starts working the system must be immediately switch back to Hathaway ie., eth0
4)All of the above if possible must be done without the intervention from me.
I heard somewhere that we can achieve this using network manager but I don’t know how to do so.
Kindly suggest how this can be done.
To set Network Manager in KDE do YaST / Root Password / Network Devices / Network Settings and if NM is activated, you get a warning so press OK and then Cancel. The NM icon is already on the KDE Taskbar.
If you get no warning then you need to activate NW to auto startup for you. On the Network Settings / Global Options Tab / Check the “User Control with NetworkManager” bullet and then select OK on bottom right. Follow the previous instruction link on NetworkManager setup.
Link aggregation seems to fit your specifications, especially with “Active-backup” mode:
“Only one NIC slave in the bond is active. A different slave becomes active if, and only if, the active slave fails. The single logical bonded interface’s MAC address is externally visible on only one NIC (port) to avoid distortion in the network switch. This mode provides fault tolerance.” [1]
Disclaimer : I never tried link aggregation myself. I hope this will help you to reach your objective!
I think you can create a link agregation with Network Manager by adding a new “bond connection”. Unfortunatly, I don’t currently have an openSUSE box at hand to check this out.