Enabling Connectivity Checking in NetworkManager

[Marc Deslauriers]

On Tue, 2012-07-10 at 15:11 -0400, Stéphane Graber wrote:
> On 07/10/2012 03:06 PM, Ted Gould wrote:
> > On Tue, 2012-07-10 at 14:48 -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> >> On Tuesday, July 10, 2012 02:41:35 PM Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre wrote:
> >>> As for the actual change, it is limited to the
> >>> /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf file; to which the following
> >>> will be added:
> >>>
> >>> [connectivity]
> >>> uri=http://start.ubuntu.com/connectivity-check.html
> >>> response=Lorem ipsum
> >>>
> >>> See the manual page for NetworkManager.conf(5) for the details of what
> >>> these settings do.
> >>>
> >>> Please let me know if you have questions or think there are good
> >>> reasons not to enable this feature. If there is no response by the end
> >>> of the week, I'd like to proceed with a enabling this in Quantal and
> >>> making sure it gets well tested.
> >>
> >> I think that a significant fraction of Ubuntu's user base is (reasonably) very 
> >> sensitive about privacy issues.  While this is no worse the the NTP check that 
> >> already exists (that is controversial), I don't think it  should be enabled by 
> >> default.
> > 
> > I think that for those who are concerned, this is trivial to disable.
> > But, I think what happens for those who are, is that Ubuntu "does the
> > right thing" by default.  If you're at a hotel or other location that
> > captures for a login page, you won't get your mail and apt and ... all
> > downloading bogus stuff.
> > 
> > 		--Ted
> 
> There are other ways to detect such cases without having the machine
> connect to an external service.
> 
> Someone suggested on IRC to implement a doesnt-exist.ubuntu.com which is
> essentially a record that Canonical would guarantee never to exist in
> the ubuntu.com. zone.
> 
> If you can resolve or even access that host, then you are behind some
> kind of captive portal/proxy.
> 

That only works if the portal/proxy spoofs DNS. Some don't do that.

Seriously, there's a whole slew of software on the desktop that connects
to the Internet regularly, I don't see how this is any different. It's
easy to change for paranoid people, and enabling it would make Ubuntu so
much better for a majority of users.

Marc.