Virtual network interface

[Peter Robinson]

> Is there way how to setup some virtual network inteface, which would
> always work, no matter if I use ethernet, wireles, VPN or whatever else
> network connection on background?
>
> * It is pretty annoying that every time I change my location, I have to
> change configuration of my virtual machines, just because now I am not
> connected via ethernet, but via WiFi.
> * I don't understand why my Xchat should loose connection, when I am
> switching from ethernet to WiFi (and they are both available during
> interim period).
>
> The type of network connection is just implementation detail, so why
> this does not work? If there is possible to create some virtual network
> interface, which would take all the real network connection under one
> umbrella, this should be default for Fedora Workstation.
>
> Additional feature could be that WiFi goes down when Ethernet is
> available etc. This functionality has been available in Lenovo's Access
> Connection tools at least 8 years ago as far as I remember and I greatly
> missing it.

There is means of doing this. For Wired -> Wireless there's relatively
straight forward ways to deal with it but you need to have support for
the handover across the entire network infrastructure, it's not really
something the host does on it's own.

There's also 802.21 which in theory could make this work for most
comms media wired/wireless/bluetooth/WWAN etc but even though it's
been about since 2008 I'm not aware of a complete implementation of it
and again it needs infrastructure support.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.21