Enabling Connectivity Checking in NetworkManager

[Stéphane Graber]

On 07/10/2012 03:20 PM, Marc Deslauriers wrote:
> 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.

Just to clarify, I'm not at all against that change, being one of the
ones who asked Mathieu to put that on this todo after looking at 2-3
implementation of that check in ubiquity alone that I'd love to get rid off.

I'm not sure I like the idea of having NM poke that same address every 5
minutes as it sounds like a pretty easy way for anyone to accurately
count the number of Ubuntu machines currently running in any given network.

Sadly it's not how it was implemented in Network Manager, but I think
I'd have preferred to have this check be exposed over DBUS so that
applications like ubiquity can use that call to query the connectivity
on demand.
This would also have allowed to extend the check to work with other
protocols, letting the client application query for a specific host and
protocol if it wants to (with the default being whatever is defined in
NetworkManager.conf).

-- 
Stéphane Graber
Ubuntu developer
http://www.ubuntu.com



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