How to let clients know the interface won't provide access to the "internet"?

Installing and Using OpenWrt Network and Wireless Configuration
1

Hi, I'm not really sure how to phrase this. Some background:
Where I'm staying I don't have ethernet or my own network, so my computer uses wifi. I want to be able to turn on my computer remotely, so I bought a little gl-inet usb powered router, that:

  • is connected to the wifi network (with internet access)
  • is accessible from the internet (through wireguard)
  • lan port is connected to my pc

With this, I can remotely run wakeonlan to power on my desktop. however, I don't want it to connect to the internet through it, as this router has a relatively weak wifi connection, only 2.4ghz, etc. Also, I didn't figure out how to work iptables etc, so currently the interface doesn't connect to the internet at all.
The computer has a much better wifi card, and I configured on linux to give precedence to the wifi connection. In windows, I couldn't find a way to do it across reboots, so it says it's connected to the network through ethernet (to the mini router), but there is no internet connection.

I was wondering if there is a way that the router will let the client know that it will not provide an internet connection, so the client will automatically not use it for internet. I'm sure something like this exists for NASs and stuff like that, windows won't try to route you through your ethernet connected NAS, right?

Thank you to anyone that read this far :sweat_smile:

2

turn off DHCP and ipv6 router advertisements on the gl-inet so that the client machine is unable to get an ip address on that interface? wakeonlan works at the layer 2 / ethernet layer so it doesn't require ip addresses etc at all to work.

1 Like
3

I would like to keep the ip/layer 3 so I can ssh between them directly

4

Use IPv6 link local addr

5

You can set up the connection statically with no gateway.
Or prioritize another connection using routing metric.

1 Like
6

Disable forwarding on the gl-inet device, and disable advertising a default route.