Enabling Connectivity Checking in NetworkManager

[Scott Kitterman]

On Tuesday, July 10, 2012 03:27:07 PM Marc Deslauriers wrote:
> 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.

I've got absolutely no objection to this if it's defaulted off for people like 
you that want it.  

My MUA and IRC client of choice just let me know they can't connect.  There's 
no spew of error messages.  If the problem is spew of error message when 
connectivity is lacking (which can happen for lots of reasons), I think this 
is the wrong way to solve it.

Scott K