in my wintel box, i have both wired and wired interfaces connected, but only wired interface is actually taking traffic. the wireless interface is kinda in backup mode until the wired interface stops working, then traffic will shift to the wireless connection. from networking perspective, both interfaces are on the same sunbet but only one is active and default route points to the wired interface as long as it connects to the switch.
but it doesn’t seem to be the case for my personal laptop, which has opensuse on it. it was working fine with wired connection alone (static) until i activated my wireless connection (dhcp). it seems that traffic flows prefer wireless connection and “netstat -rn” shows that default route always point to wireless interface.
i have solved this by created file ‘ifroute-<wired-interface>’, that made traffic going through the wired interface. but the wireless connection only kicks in when the machine was rebooted and the “netstat -rn” shows the default route pointing to the wirless interface.
via yast->network settings you can set the ifplugd priority for your cards. as far as i understand and here is the help for it.
Device Activation
Choose when to bring up the network interface. At Boot Time activates it during system boot, Never does not start the device. On Cable Connection: The interface is watched for whether there is a physical network connection. That means either the cable is connected or the wireless interface can connect to an access point. With On Hotplug, the interface is set up as soon as it is available. This is nearly the same as 'At Boot Time', but does not result in an error at boot time if the interface is not present.
Manually: You control the interface manually via 'ifup' or 'qinternet' (see 'User Controlled' below).
Using On NFSroot is nearly like 'auto'. But interfaces with this startmode will never be shut down via 'rcnetwork stop'. 'ifdown ' still works. Use this when you have a nfs or iscsi root filesystem.
IFPLUGD PRIORITY
All interfaces configured with On Cable Connection and with IFPLUGD_PRIORITY != 0 will be used mutually exclusive. If more then one of these interfaces is On Cable Connection then we need a way to decide which interface to take up. Therefore we have to set the priority of each interface.