GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 693674
never pop up a password prompt out of the blue
Last modified: 2014-03-20 12:13:38 UTC
I was watching ebassi's LCA talk and noticed his presentation was interrupted by a NM password prompt. We should only pop up network password prompts or for that matter any dialogs at all in direct response to the user's request. If the network is unable to connect with existing credentials it should indicate an error in the shell menu and allow the user to click the item to reconnect.
In 0.9.8 NM will no longer pop up the connection dialog unless we know for 95% sure the password is actually wrong. I suppose we can argue about the case where it *is* wrong and how to handle that. I would argue that if this is the first time we're connecting to the wifi network, that yes, we do want to interrupt the user and ask for a new password if it's wrong because the user is sitting there waiting after having typed in the wrong password. Looks like NM will still ask for the password if: 1) It's static WEP and DHCP fails, which could indicate either wrong WEP key or driver problems 2) We're 95% sure the WPA-PSK is wrong or the 802.1x credentials are wrong, because the supplicant told us so We could also make (1) and (2) simply notify the failure instead of asking.
NM still doesn't seem that great at this to me (I'm running 0.9.8 on Arch linux). At work, I frequently connect to our corporate network. I would say at least once a day I see a random modal popup for my password (aside from the expected one at the beginning of the day). This may be due to the network requiring an authentication popup (I've heard that's a potential setting). But I'd say that more than 50% of the time, the popup happens when I'm already typing something, so I ruin my saved password, and have to type it from scratch. The reason I'm here this morning is that I decided to (usb) tether with my phone, and NM was _still_ popping up dialogs for my corporate network, while I was actively using the tethering connection. It happened three times. The first two I cancelled out of, but that just delayed another popup for two minutes or so. Apparently the right choice was to confirm connecting to my corporate network, even though I was not going to use it. I'm relatively sure that I've been in this situation before due to issues with the corporate network, which meant that network manager would randomly pop up authentication dialogs whenever it was temporarily able to access the network, even though I was already connected through my phone. I don't really have thoughts on how to do all of this better, except that almost anything is better than a randomly occuring full-screen modal overlay. At least in my situation, the current behavior is a serious annoyance, and I almost always make mistakes when it happens. 95% accurate is not the way I'd describe it. :)
(In reply to comment #0) > We should only pop up network password prompts or for > that matter any dialogs at all in direct response to the user's request. That would be handled by gnome-shell itself then; just have ShellNetworkAgent (or the JS NetworkAgent) ignore requests where the flags don't include NM_SETTINGS_GET_SECRETS_FLAG_USER_REQUESTED.
(In reply to comment #3) > (In reply to comment #0) > > We should only pop up network password prompts or for > > that matter any dialogs at all in direct response to the user's request. > > That would be handled by gnome-shell itself then; just have ShellNetworkAgent > (or the JS NetworkAgent) ignore requests where the flags don't include > NM_SETTINGS_GET_SECRETS_FLAG_USER_REQUESTED. Yes, I added that flag for exactly this purpose, and I have a patch that replaces the dialog with a notification, but it was blocked by designers long ago. Marking dupe of the bug with the code. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 660293 ***
*** Bug 726764 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***