-------- Original Message -------- From: Brüns, Stefan Sent: Monday, Oct 16, 2017 2:10 PM SAE To: opensuse-factory@opensuse.org; Marco Calistri Subject: [opensuse-factory] Re: Access Hotspot notification? wasTumbleweed - Review of the week 2017/41
On Montag, 16. Oktober 2017 17:47:25 CEST Marco Calistri wrote:
Il 16/10/2017 02:56, Luca Beltrame ha scritto:
Il giorno Sun, 15 Oct 2017 13:44:59 +0000 Marco Calistri
ha scritto: so I really don't know what happened because I've not touched/changed anything.
The service outage affected also conncheck.opensuse.org, so that's why you see that. It's part of NM's connectivity checking. Should you want to disable it, add
interval=0
to /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf under the "uri" in the [connectivity] section. A restart of NM is required to put this into effect.
Thanks for the suggestion, it is the same workaround which Malcolm has posted by the Forum.
Beside the issue itself I really don't know why NM needs to check the connectivity and furthermore why in case of failure it opens a big notification window on the user desktop.
For the check itself, this is IMHO very welcome. Having a working Wifi or ethernet connection is not a good indication for internet connectivity (and thats what the majority of NM users is interested in). You may have a broken DSL connection and may not be aware of it, and you may be blocked by a captive portal and not aware of it.
So far I used to check connectivity by hand opening the Google page with a browser or even issuing a nslookup by the console. First time that I see an embedded connectivity checker inside a NM, for this reason I'm quite surprised.
While a broken DSL connection may be also detected by e.g. ICMP requests, captive portals can only be detected by connecting to a known HTTP server and comparing the result with a known good response.
IMHO from one side such NM behavior looks like a sort of a "spyware" and from the other side appears to be a bad design of its notification section.
You fear being spyed on by a plain HTTP request without any cookies, special headers, nothing else?
Cannot see what is running inside the system but it is also clear that a true spyware running in background, wouldn't notify nothing to the user.
The notification is *not* done by NetworkManager, but by the applet. The Plasma applet puts an unobtrusive exclamation mark on its icon if the connection does not work as expected, and shows more information in the tooltip.
Kind regards,
Stefan
Thanks for the additional explanation Regards, Marco