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I'd like to do some experimentation with hostap without disabling my primary wireless interface. How do I tell networkmanager to keep its hands off a specific interface or interfaces while allowing it to continue managing all other interfaces normally? I'm using Ubuntu 9.04.

(Wasn't sure if this should go on superuser or serverfault, as networkmanager isn't much of a 'server' tool - if it belongs on serverfault please feel free to move it)

Edit: I've tried adding this to /etc/network/interfaces:

allow-hotplug wlan2
iface wlan2 inet static

But this has no apparent effect, even after restarting NetworkManager.

Here's my /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf:



Edit[2]: Looks like I needed to restart nm-system-settings, then NetworkManager.

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You don't have to put [Ubuntu] in the title. You could've made it 'Disabling network manager for a specific interface in Ubuntu', not to mention it's already tagged as 'ubuntu'. Just letting you know for future questions. –  Jorge Israel Peña Jul 21 '09 at 3:20

2 Answers 2

up vote 9 down vote accepted

To quote /usr/share/doc/network-manager/README.Debian:


Only devices that are not listed in /etc/network/interfaces or which have been configured "auto" and "dhcp" (with no other options) are managed by NM.

This way you can setup a custom (static) configuration for a device and NM will not try to override this setting.

After modifying /etc/network/interfaces you have to restart NM with the command "/etc/init.d/network-manager restart".

and then it has some examples.

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You can make the configuration either to the text files or via the network config gui. Either way results in NM not trying to manage the interface. –  pcapademic Jul 21 '09 at 19:39
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work... see above –  bdonlan Jul 22 '09 at 0:47
... and solved it, see my second edit. Thanks. –  bdonlan Jul 22 '09 at 0:57

You can also add this line to /etc/network/interfaces

iface wlan0 inet manual
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