Enabling Connectivity Checking in NetworkManager

[Marc Deslauriers]

On Tue, 2012-07-10 at 15:21 -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> 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.

Solving it for a good proportion of cases is better than not solving it
at all.

It drives me nuts that Evolution and gnome-xchat spew error messages
before I log into a portal, when this problem is already solved on other
operating systems by using essentially the same technique.

Marc.