Set Wifi As Metered Connection

Question

I'm running on Ubuntu 15.10(KDE). I have enabled automatic updates on many applications.I'm now connected to Wifi Hotspot from my phone so don't want Ubuntu to auto update apps and save my bandwidth to reduce usage as much as possible.In windows there is an option to set a Wifi as metered connection and windows wouldn't auto update the applications similarly how to do it in Ubuntu?

Answer 1

From Ubuntu 20.04 They added metered connection option.

GUI:

Open Wi-Fi setting click on the ⚙ Gear Icon next to your wifi SSID. At the bottom there is a Metered Connection checkbox.

Terminal:

Turn on:

nmcli connection modify YOUR_WIFI_SSID connection.metered yes

Show current status:

nmcli -f connection.metered connection show YOUR_WIFI_SSID

Answer 2

This feature is not implemented yet. It is drafted in the wiki, to not check for updates when a connection is detected as a mobile broadband connection.

For now, you should disable auto-updates or check for updates, if you use your mobile connection too often, to save bandwitdh, then re-enable it when you connect to wifi.

Answer 3

Command-line Interface

1. Get the device's current connection

   nmcli -t -f GENERAL.CONNECTION --mode tabular device show $DEVICE | head -n1
   

   -t is required as there is a space appended at the end

2. Show current metered status

   nmcli -f connection.metered connection show $CONNECTION
   

   Where $CONNECTION is the string returned by the previous command.

3. Change metered status

   The valid statuses are yes, no, and unknown. unknown is the default, which will do the guessing based on things like the DHCP option
   eg:- ANDROID_METERED

4. Now disable the metered connection:

   nmcli connection modify $CONNECTION connection.metered no
   

   Change $CONNECTION by the output of the first command.

Graphical User Interface

1. Go to settings (by searching settings in the application launcher and then opening the settings app)

2. There navigate to the Wi-Fi settings:

3. There go to the current connection settings

4. You will see a screen like this:

5. As you can see my connection isn't metered, but your checkbox may be ticked, so, just untick it and click on Apply.