Enabling Connectivity Checking in NetworkManager

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 3:39 PM, Marc Deslauriers
<marc.deslauriers at canonical.com> wrote:
[...]
> I'm confused...Network Manager already exposes connectivity information
> over dbus, and that's what apps are supposed to use...

Yes, and that will still work ;)

>
>> 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).
>
> Well, the idea is apps ask Network Manager, so it can be configured in a
> central location, and not have every app try and override the default...

On the other hand, it *does* become a much more valid test if the
application can ask for a particular host specifically, and a port --
then you know whether that exact service is reachable; which is not
necessarily the case otherwise. For instance, at home I'm clearly
connected and not behind a captive portal, yet my ISP blocks outgoing
port 25. Evolution could be thought to know to ask *something* over
DBus (or via a library) to know the current status of $mailhost :25.
The library or DBus service should know what the process for figuring
out whether what comes up from the request to port 25 should look
like.

That said, in this form it's getting pretty far out of the scope of
this email, and also out of what NetworkManager should, IMO, focus on.

Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <mathieu.tl at gmail.com>
Freenode: cyphermox, Jabber: mathieu.tl at gmail.com
4096R/EE018C93 1967 8F7D 03A1 8F38 732E  FF82 C126 33E1 EE01 8C93