GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 684953
captive portal detection for network
Last modified: 2014-02-17 19:52:37 UTC
If we connect to a captive portal or any other not-really-connected-to-the-internet type of connection. We should do a couple of things differently. First, we should differentiate this state with a different icon in the top bar. Secondly, we should not remember the connection in a way that tries to autoconnect to it later. If the connection later gets changed to be routable to the internet then we should change the icon and remember the connection. The primary use case for this is a so-called captive portal at a cafe, airport, etc. We'll need to design a new icon for this. Apparently there is already support in NM for this: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/commit/?id=267bc993a710ec3923b6f243cb6a4b047fa49ec4
To handle intranet type connections that are valid and never get routed outside we could have an option in the network settings for that connection to consider them fully connected.
We're using a single icon for nm, we can't overlay symbolic icons nicelly, so I guess the only things we could do is forget about connection strenght or provide a set of connection strenght icons + captive portal indication. If we go the forget about connection strenght route, we need to make sure the user will still recognize such an icon as a network related one, for example if we use some generic warning icon it may not be clear that's the right one to click to act on network settings.
An easy solution could be to change the symbolic icon color to indicate a warning
Or perhaps use the "..." state icon and automatically pop up the portal login page. I think this makes sense because we also use ... for "more input needed".
We'll also need to be able to bring up the login page automatically.
(In reply to comment #2) > We're using a single icon for nm, we can't overlay symbolic icons nicelly It's not too hard. It can be done.
It seems we do have a candidate icon for this: network-no-route-symbolic
Created attachment 259874 [details] [review] network-no-route: focus the metaphor to the primary use case - this situation is most likely to catch for captive portals (pun intended) http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=684953
(In reply to comment #8) > Created an attachment (id=259874) [details] [review] > network-no-route: focus the metaphor to the primary use case Note that current NM distinguishes NM_CONNECTIVITY_PORTAL ("you're behind a captive portal") from NM_CONNECTIVITY_LIMITED ("you're not behind a portal, but you can't reach the Internet". eg, your wifi network is working, but its connection to your ISP connection is down)
When the portal is detected and we invoke the authentication agent I think we still want the icon to show the "..." connecting state. For the new no-route icon, do we want that to be placed next to the wifi signal level icon? As we do with VPN? If we do that then it might work fine for both portal and limited-connectivity.
Is ee the dependent bug got closed, and http://nmcheck.gnome.org/check_network_status.txt is supposedly in place (I do get a 403 when trying to access it, though)
Thanks for taking the time to report this bug. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but we are happy to tell you that the problem has already been fixed. It should be solved in the next software version. You may want to check for a software upgrade. (The other bug is not fixed, but the part about connectivity checks landed) *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 723570 ***