Enabling Connectivity Checking in NetworkManager

[Jeremy Bicha]

On 10 July 2012 14:41, Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <mathieu-tl at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Connectivity checking would be a big benefit in helping with properly
> recognizing the cases where you're connected to wireless, but actually
> behind a captive portal which catches and redirects requests --
> sometimes not all that gracefully. The most frequent impact of this is
> a corrupted apt cache when the files don't fail to be downloaded, but
> instead contain http data from the captive portal.

The corrupted apt caches are a hugely annoying bug. I have this
problem at work which sadly uses captive portals. Worse, there's not a
user-friendly way of fixing apt once this bug is triggered; it breaks
really bad.

I was thinking that it could be fixed by making apt smart enough to
not accept invalid data. But if NM can fix it, then I for one for
would be pretty happy.

It sounds though like apt still needs to be smarter or NM needs to be
smarter because there is still an up-to-5-minute window for things to
break.

Jeremy