Enabling Connectivity Checking in NetworkManager

[Stéphane Graber]

On 07/10/2012 03:06 PM, Ted Gould wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-07-10 at 14:48 -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
>> On Tuesday, July 10, 2012 02:41:35 PM Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre wrote:
>>> 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.
> 
> I think that for those who are concerned, this is trivial to disable.
> But, I think what happens for those who are, is that Ubuntu "does the
> right thing" by default.  If you're at a hotel or other location that
> captures for a login page, you won't get your mail and apt and ... all
> downloading bogus stuff.
> 
> 		--Ted

There are other ways to detect such cases without having the machine
connect to an external service.

Someone suggested on IRC to implement a doesnt-exist.ubuntu.com which is
essentially a record that Canonical would guarantee never to exist in
the ubuntu.com. zone.

If you can resolve or even access that host, then you are behind some
kind of captive portal/proxy.

-- 
Stéphane Graber
Ubuntu developer
http://www.ubuntu.com


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