Giving wlan0 priority over eth0

[thegrind]

I have installed Gentoo on my RPi5. The Pi has a connection for the ethernet cable and wifi. I have them both connected and they both have different local ips so for example eth0 has 192.168.1.10 and wlan0 has 192.168.1.11. My wifi connection is faster so I would like to use this is as the default interface but every time I boot it defaults to eth0. Does anyone know how I can set this up. I did it before with NetworkManager by using nmcli and setting a priority so I'd like to see if I could do something similar with iwd instead of having to switch to NM.

[pingtoo]

Have you tried with nmcli?

I don't use wifi for my rpi5, but nmcli does show

[szatox]

1) Why not just unplug the wire if you don't want to use it anyway?
2) What do you use to manage wired connection? I though iwd handles wireless part and is a replacement for wpa_supplicant rather than networkmanager, am I wrong about it?
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[thegrind]

[thegrind]

[flexibeast]

Since you use `networkctl` i presume you're on a systemd-based setup. i'm not a systemd user myself, so i can't help with specifics, but what i can say is that you need to specify a routing metric for each interface so that the wired interface has a higher priority. (On an OpenRC+netifrc system, like i have, one specifies these metrics in the /etc/conf.d/net configuration file.)
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https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Flexibeast

[szatox]

Well, the rules for selecting the outgoing interface go like this:
1 Find all interfaces with routing rules containing the destination
2 Order them by mask (longer mask = higher priority)
3 Break ties with metrics (lower cost/number = higher priority)

Wifi's default metric is like 600, and ethernet's default metric depends on interface speed, but will always be lower. And here comes trick from OpenVPN:
add 2 routes to your wifi, to 0.0.0.0/1 and 128.0.0.0/1
Those will override the default gateway ( 0/0 ) regardless of metrics. And you can do the same with ipv6 address space. It is a bit of a hack, but other things are unlikely to mess this setup up even if they try.

[thegrind]

[thegrind]

[flexibeast]

[szatox]

You can check routing table with
ip route
Add and remove rules manually with ip route add/del <rule> respectively.
Doing it automatically requires you to know what manages your network, so you can configure that thing to do your bidding correctly.

I still think you're over-engineering it though. If you want to use wifi because it's faster, but disable it for updates, you might just as well use wifi and enable eth for updates.
Also, depending on your actual use patterns, that speed difference between eth and wifi might not even matter, making the cable a better choice overall.
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[thegrind]

[Ralphred]

[pingtoo]

I think it is dhcpcd start it.

Check dmesg for dhcpcd messages.

[thegrind]

It was dhcpcd that was starting eth0. I removed it from the run level and then did net.eth0 and net.wlan0 and both of these worked. I then tried to bond them together following the Gentoo wiki. I was able to get bond0 to work with eth0 but I can't get it to work with wlan0 on it's own as I don't get any internet. I also noticed that it blanked out my /etc/resolv.conf file or if put down eth0 and wlan0 as slaves it doesn't use wlan0 as I unplug the ethernet and I lose internet. I am using iwd for wlan0 but I removed it from the runlevel.

Here is my net file.

[Ralphred]

Even with a working bond, the slaves will not show ip addresses, from a working bond on a Pi4:

[thegrind]

After I removed dhcpcd from the run level and I added net.eth0 and net.wlan0 and made the metric changes, I am able to get wlan0 as the highest priority. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

I assumed with bonding that net.bond0 started the necessary services like wpa supplicant so that the wlan0 connects. Is this not the case. Do you have wpa _supplicant added to a run level with bonding and to a wpa_supplicant.conf file that has your SSDI and password?

The other day my wifi connection went bad and I got dropped to 7MB/s versus the usual 210MB/s. In bonding can you set it up, at least with wlan0 and eth0, to combine the two bandwidths together so if that situation happens again I will still be at 60MB/s (what eth0 puts out). Of course I can reboot just trying to see what I can make work.

[Ralphred]

[thegrind]

Thanks for the help. My problem was that I wasn't starting wpa_supplicant. bond0 gets assigned an ip say 192.168.0.140. I use my Rpi to stream so if I unplug the ethernet cable while streaming it's like nothing happened. The only problem I have is I can no longer access 192.168.0.140 most of the time. I am using broadcast mode. I have also tried round robin. One time it worked to where I didn't lose my putty session on my windows pc but the other 5 or so times I have tested I lose my putty session and I can't ping 192.168.0.140. Ifconfig shows the ip of bond0 as 192.168.0.140 even with the cable unplugged. When I plug the cable in I can access 192.168.0.140 again. Do you know how I can fix this as I can't use my kodi remote when this happens.

[thegrind]

Okay, I figured it out. I had to set a static IP to bond0 and define a route to the router as the system was confused due to previous leases and bond0 wasn't being assigned a mac address.

[Ralphred]