GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 785699
NetworkManager disconnects primary connection if VPN connection which had been configured to connect automatically fails
Last modified: 2020-11-12 14:28:34 UTC
I've set up a VPN connection to connect automatically for my primary connection. When my primary connection is established, NM tries to connect to VPN, and if for some reason VPN connection fails, it disconnects the primary connection. My log looks like device (wls1): state change: secondaries -> failed (reason 'secondary-connection-failed') [90 120 54] manager: NetworkManager state is now CONNECTED_LOCAL device (wls1): Activation: failed for connection '...' device (wls1): state change: failed -> disconnected (reason 'none') [120 30 0] dhcp4 (wls1): canceled DHCP transaction, DHCP client pid 16337 dhcp4 (wls1): state changed bound -> done device (wls1): set-hw-addr: set MAC address to ... (scanning) sup-iface[...,wls1]: connection disconnected (reason -3) I guess 'secondary-connection-failed' is the key string here. Has it been decided that people who want to have some VPN automatically connected want this behavior? I think it's a bug.
(In reply to Eugene Shatsky from comment #0) > I guess 'secondary-connection-failed' is the key string here. Has it been > decided that people who want to have some VPN automatically connected want > this behavior? I think it's a bug. I agree. The current behaviour seems to be that the primary connection must not be used unless the VPN connection is established. That's not obvious from the wording of "Automatically connect to VPN when using this connection". I'd prefer if "Automatically connect to VPN when using this connection" meant *try* to automatically connect, but if the VPN connection isn't established, continue to use the primary connection. For example, when my laptop connects to my home wifi router, I'd like it to also *attempt* to connect to my work VPN. But if it's the weekend and I don't need the VPN, I'd like to be able to hit "cancel" on the VPN password prompt, but have the wifi connection stay up. Instead cancelling the VPN connection causes the wifi to drop and reconnect. If some people want the current behaviour it would be nice to have an option to support both forms, "require VPN when using this connection" and "attempt to connect to VPN when this conenction is first brought up".
bugzilla.gnome.org is being shut down in favor of a GitLab instance. We are closing all old bug reports and feature requests in GNOME Bugzilla which have not seen updates for a long time. If you still use NetworkManager and if you still see this bug / want this feature in a recent and supported version of NetworkManager, then please feel free to report it at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/-/issues/ Thank you for creating this report and we are sorry it could not be implemented (workforce and time is unfortunately limited).