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. Kind regards, Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <mathieu...@ubuntu.com> Freenode: cyphermox, Jabber: mathieu...@gmail.com 4096R/EE018C93 1967 8F7D 03A1 8F38 732E FF82 C126 33E1 EE01 8C93 -- ubuntu-devel mailing list ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel