Enabling Connectivity Checking in NetworkManager

[Scott Kitterman]

On Tuesday, July 10, 2012 02:06:32 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.

First, I do a fair amount of travelling for $WORK, so I know all about these.  
For people who travel, they already know about logging into the web page when 
you get to the hotel.

This kind of check doesn't actually guarantee anything since different places 
handle these things differently.  Even if the proposed check works, if a hotel 
captures and redirects port 25 or 587 (yes, port 587 redirection happens, 
although it's positively brain dead and rare) then your mail is still screwed.

If you're connected of not is on a port by port basis, so I don't think this 
reliably solves the problem in any case.

Scott K