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Bug 439310 - the user has no information of internet availability
the user has no information of internet availability
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Product: NetworkManager
Classification: Platform
Component: general
git master
Other All
: Normal minor
: ---
Assigned To: Dan Williams
Dan Williams
: 651954 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2007-05-17 22:01 UTC by Nicolò Chieffo
Modified: 2012-07-30 20:37 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---


Attachments
NetworkManager-0.6.4-internet-icon.diff.1 (10.12 KB, patch)
2007-05-17 22:02 UTC, Nicolò Chieffo
none Details | Review
NetworkManager-0.6.4-internet-icon.diff some errors corrected (7.42 KB, patch)
2007-05-18 14:54 UTC, Nicolò Chieffo
none Details | Review
icon example (736 bytes, image/png)
2007-05-18 14:55 UTC, Nicolò Chieffo
  Details

Description Nicolò Chieffo 2007-05-17 22:01:53 UTC
adding a small world icon in a corner of the icon would help users a lot in debugging their network problems

Other information:
I'm attaching a patch proposal.
the function that is detecting if internet is available or not is blank, because I don't know if it has already been implemented somewhere
Comment 1 Nicolò Chieffo 2007-05-17 22:02:55 UTC
Created attachment 88366 [details] [review]
NetworkManager-0.6.4-internet-icon.diff.1

get_internet_available() has blank body
Comment 2 Nicolò Chieffo 2007-05-18 10:33:48 UTC
maybe the get_internet_enabled function could check if a connection to ubuntu.com and gnome.org is available...
Comment 3 Nicolò Chieffo 2007-05-18 14:54:25 UTC
Created attachment 88397 [details] [review]
NetworkManager-0.6.4-internet-icon.diff some errors corrected
Comment 4 Nicolò Chieffo 2007-05-18 14:55:47 UTC
Created attachment 88398 [details]
icon example
Comment 5 Christopher Aillon 2007-06-05 23:03:55 UTC
I'm not entirely sure we want to do this really... For one, it could be seen as phoning home.  Secondly, it doesn't actually mean that you're on the internet if you're connected via a bridge that requires a login.  Or if someone modifies their /etc/hosts to point gnome.org at localhost for example.  Too many ways this could break.
Comment 6 Nicolò Chieffo 2007-06-06 09:29:23 UTC
Yes, you are right, but who is going to point gnome.org to localhost? Only someone who wants to break this feature I think...

And you know, this feature is implemented in windows vista. We could try to discover how!
Comment 7 Javier Jardón (IRC: jjardon) 2009-08-12 20:46:44 UTC
You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue for you.

Can you please check again if the issue you reported here still happens in a recent version and update this report by adding a comment and adjusting the 'Version' field?

Again thank you for reporting this and sorry that it could not be fixed for the version you originally used here.

Without feedback this report will be closed as INCOMPLETE after 6 weeks.
Comment 8 Nicolò Chieffo 2009-08-17 18:15:59 UTC
Yes, this is still an issue, but I didn't understand if you consider it solvable or not
Comment 9 Javier Jardón (IRC: jjardon) 2009-08-17 18:21:54 UTC
Let's maintainers to decide ;)

Comment 7 responded, so reopening
Comment 10 satanand 2010-06-28 07:28:32 UTC
Microsoft vista does it by opening a web page which was something like www.microsoftxx.com I do not exactly remember the page but it can be easily found out. this works even if you are behind a captive portal (something like a hotel wifi where you need a login etc) because http redirect will not give you the expected page. We cannot use ping to determine if there is connection (because some captive portals let ICMP go through but not HTTP). we should use some w3c library or libcurl for getting and may be libxml for processing http pages. It is also important that you know the site you are trying and it does not change its expected content.

This would certainly be a nice feature for laymen users. 

We ended up putting this feature in our custom network manager in my previous company. 

The only problem is that internet connection is not a physical state. there is no notification to you when you lose internet connection beyond the first hop (something at the backend is wrong)  Another problem is that the sites you are trying may be  down temporarily).
Comment 11 Mehmet Giritli 2010-11-16 09:43:02 UTC
NM should definitely try to do this. As mentioned in the above, Windows does it and it works pretty well. 

But the main problem is that applications such as empathy often try to connect to internet when network is up but there is no internet. For example, when I reset my modem, NM thinks that we have internet connection just because we have the lan connection to the modem initially, but it takes a while until adsl connection is established and an ip address is acquired. NM should consider the actual internet connection first, before signalling the apps that are listening to it. 

Even better, NM could send different types of signals to the listening apps and make a distinction between the availability of lan connection and availability of internet connection.
Comment 12 Dan Williams 2011-04-04 15:42:44 UTC
NM 0.9 has a new device state called IP_CHECK in which the actual check of whether or not we have real internet connectivity should get done.  We should duplicate the Windows behavior of defining a URL (and make that configurable from /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf) that NM contacts during this stage and compares to a known result.  After checking we advance device states to ACTIVATED and set the global connection state to CONNECTED_LOCAL, CONNECTED_SITE, or CONNECTED_GLOBAL depending on whether we got the expected response back.
Comment 13 Dan Williams 2011-06-07 23:25:10 UTC
*** Bug 651954 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***