Fedora is sending between 3.5KB and up to 16.5 KB every 5 seconds WHEN the WiFi adaptor is completely disabled from within the BIOS and my Ethernet is unplugged.
Why am I still seeing data being sent!? HOW?
I have a Dell Inc. XPS 13 9310 2-in-1 but they refuse to honour my service contract due to me having installed Fedora after market - which is UNSUPPORTED for this model.
I’m beginning to wonder if there is some kind of hidden mesh network wireless going on or maybe it’s somehow bypassing the BIOS setting for the inbuilt Intel WIreless Adapter - which is explicitly set to OFF. But even then how would this transmit without a known hot-spot???
How confusing and a little disturbing.
From memory this has been the standard behavior since installing Fedora 39 and has continued through Fedora 40. I am seeing this sending activity via the standard “System monitor” app that comes installed (see image).
Your fedora installation (and all linux distros) has an internal virtual network interface named lo as can be seen when you use the ip address command. The system uses this interface to talk to itself and what you appear to be seeing is that virtual network communication.
In GNOME system monitor, I vaguely recall there being a toggle to show stats for different devices (maybe HDD if not Network adapters). If that exists, I’d have immediate questions to QA as to why virtual/unrelated devices are enabled by-default to be raising questions like this.
I’d investigate this further by seeing if there’s a way to check what adapters are active, what ports are open, and what executable are communicating over it. I never thought to check this, and I suspect stuff shouldn’t be communicating over a virtual network adapter, vs sockets.
I have taken a look at this further and found Tailscale appears to be the process sending the data. I’m not sure why, but it might have something to do with it being a proxy VPN which then loops back to the the physical adapter for some reason?
