Nicolas Williams wrote:
> The Windows GUI model would be: pop up a little ballon over the systray
> informing the user that a network is available; the user can click in it
> if they want to do something (and the ballon tells them as much).
Too true:
1) This drives me nuts at work when I have a wired network connection
and it still feels the need to tell me "connected to wlan" ...
"disconnected from wlan" at regular intervals. When I've got a wired
connection I don't care if I'm also connected wirelessly or not!
Telling me "connected" or "not connected" when this is the only
connection, or when changing zones, is fine though.
2) At home it's happy to also tell me "8 wireless networks nearby" and
offer to let me connect without connecting automatically, which is good.
Although, again, telling me this when I have a wired connection seems
like too many pop-up balloons, IMHO at least.
>>At least by default, I think we have to get to the state where
>>questions are not necessary. As an option, we could offer a "please
>>pester me about the least little thing" feature. But I don't think
>>we've met the goal of "approachability" if that feature is the
>>default.
Correct.
> But do you want your laptop switching profiles as networks come and go?
> How will you know which of two radically different networks (e.g., home
> vs. SWAN) you're connected to when link comes up on a wired interface?
If you're sat in your house, odds on are that it's the home network.
And similarly if you're in a Sun office there's a good chance it's the
SWAN. Presumably? So the question here is not really how you know
where you are, but how the OS knows where it is, since it only gets to
probe the network, not know other location info such as "I just drove
into work":
- For wireless you can presumably use SSIDs, i.e. a profile that says
"if SSID=my_home_wlan then do home-specific things".
- For wired there's no SSID, and configuring IP addresses is ugly
although possible. For DHCP, I guess you could say "if
dhcp_domainname=foo.com then use foo.com profile". Or DNS servers or
something else returned from DHCP.
- For wired with fixed IP addresses, it's trickier. But this implies
some manual config at least.
I think the key point is it's good to have general principles such as
"never connect to a wireless network unless the user has OK'ed that
network in the past, or OK's it now, or has a profile for default
unknown wlans". But if the user has previously configured their home
and work networks then switching should merit notification but not
require active confirmation for each transition.
> Since we might enable/disable services and switch ipfilter configs
> according to which profile is selected one might want to strongly
> authenticate the network, but, how? DHCP won't do it.
Good question.
For people not running servers on a laptop or sharing files, and just
wanting to have the network configures and web proxies set as needed,
this lack of authentication may be OK though.
> Now, if it is possible to configure profiles such that at a given moment
> a single profile can be selected which unambiguously that we know the
> user would want, then, sure, switch to it. But this is the kind of
> thing that the user should have to explicit request.
Need to try to minimize this based on confidence that you already know
what the user wants. E.g.:
* For WLANs, you should probably ask before the first connection but
then generally re-connect if you see the same network again.
* For a wired connection you can probably assume the user wants to
connect without being asked, i.e. that plugging in the network cable
implies consent. And if you can identify it's a network that there's
already a config for, then switching to that is probably OK.
How to identify "which network" for wired cases may be the issue.
IMHO at least,
Hugh.
