Enabling Connectivity Checking in NetworkManager

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 3:21 PM, Andrea Corbellini
<corbellini.andrea at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/07/12 20:41, Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre wrote:
>>
>> I'd like to enable connectivity checking in NetworkManager. We'd use
>> http://start.ubuntu.com/connectivity-check.html, running the check
>> every 5 minutes starting from the connection being established.
>> start.ubuntu.com has already been in use for a while to verify
>> connectivity from the installer, IIRC.
>
>
> Isn't a check every 5 minutes a frequency a bit too high? I mean, if a
> computer is connected to a "captive portal which catches and redirects
> requests", then the chances that the connectivity will change during time
> are very low. In my opinion, having a high frequency will just cause
> unnecessary wakeups and will show boring data in tools used for network
> debugging.
>
> Also, what should happen if the connection to start.ubuntu.com times out
> because of a network congestion? Has this case been discussed? (I wasn't at
> UDS)

Great point. I've been considering the implications of that particular
frequency. It's the default in NM, and it seems like a reasonable one,
but I agree such amount of regular traffic might be an issue for
start.ubuntu.com ;)

As for whetehr the connection might change during that delay, it's far
more about being able to properly catch the change from "captive" to
internet access reliably and without delay than the other way around,
so perhaps there's something to be fixed there, and stop the check
once it's been successful, or at least delay it further.

Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <mathieu-tl at ubuntu.com>
Freenode: cyphermox, Jabber: mathieu.tl at gmail.com
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