On Tuesday, July 10, 2012 02:41:35 PM Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre wrote: > Hi, > > At UDS some of us discussed the connectivity checking feature of > NetworkManager, which landed not long before the Precise release. > > 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. > > I'd like to enable connectivity checking in NetworkManager. We'd use > http://start.ubuntu.com/connectivity-check.html, running the check > every 5 minutes starting from the connection being established. > start.ubuntu.com has already been in use for a while to verify > connectivity from the installer, IIRC. > > The net impact of this change will be a slight modification in the > actual status reported by NM -- NM_STATE_CONNECTED_SITE, rather than > NM_STATE_CONNECTED_GLOBAL. Most applications that depend on > NetworkManager to check connectivity already handle (the old state > NM_STATE_CONNECTED which now maps to GLOBAL), CONNECTED_LOCAL, > CONNECTED_SITE and CONNECTED_GLOBAL as meaning that they have internet > connectivity, so I don't expect consequences for the vast majority of > applications. > > 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. Scott K -- ubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
