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Rationale
Currently network manager can assure you that you're connected to a network, but if you want to be sure that that network is supplying you with the internet, you have to go check it for yourself. I propose some kind of indicator in the notification area that indicates access to, say, the ubuntu website.
In addition to simple broken connections, this would be useful when using public wifi that requires a logon.
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Good idea.
This is handy even for a normal in-house network.
More Ideas;
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The network is OK, but the internet connection is down.
Is it the modem/router, gateway, isp, or connection?
An icon that changes state (a little - like has an "X" across it, or gores grey, or flashes, or has a rotating arrow which goes grey or flashes).
Hover over the icon for a brief status report.
Or right click for more information and option to printout some diagnostics (maybe including time of dropped connection).
Maybe have a modem reset button (need to bookmark the modem webpage, and extract the reset switch script, to assign it to the button).
Maybe a similar report for network connected printers, and file servers.
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Sidney
wrote on the 11 Jul 08 at 09:10
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First, good idea. Only problem is that then you depend on the site to be up at all times, because if it's down, many users will cry that they just lost their internet.
But a whole list of sites to check could make it work.
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+1
Sometimes my internet connection is down (problem with my modem), but Network Manager still shows that connection is normal.
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Why not just ping the DNS server(s) as an indication of internet availability?
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Sidney
wrote on the 11 Jul 08 at 16:52
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@chipbennett: Very good idea. If your DNS is down, your internet is also gone. So that'd be the optimal solution.
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dino
wrote on the 12 Jul 08 at 13:22
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@chipbennett
In an ideal world... this would be perfect :) But some DNS doesn't answer icmp ping - for example my ISP does so (dns: 217.237.149.142). So pinging by making an actual resolve request would be better.
Good idea especialy as more and more programs relay on network-manager to determine online/offline status.
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@dino:
What about OpenDNS? Do either of their DNS servers respond to pings?
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hspaans
wrote on the 13 Jul 08 at 18:22
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Ping or ICMP is being blocked by many companies on the border of there network so that would break Ubuntu in corporate environments. This also due to the fact most of them will run in private IP-space.
Setting up a HTTP-check may require an username/password for the proxy in some cases. This is also seen with Firefox for example.
This mainly leaves DNS to check. The only zone that is very safe to query is the root zone. This may break in some cases due to broken or faulty network setups, but should work in 99% of the cases. Also since most resolves have a copy of this zone it should not put an extra load on the root servers.
Another thing, NetworkManager can may the decission the when its in 169.254.0.0/16 for example that there is no DHCP-server and so also no routing unless the machine is on IPv6 for example and has more than a link-address.
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I intended this with username/password proxies in mind. If the ubuntu webpage is requested and a proxy login page is returned, the indicator would show negative as it should. Once logged in, it would show that the user is connected to the internet.
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How about monitoring existing resolver requests, as well at the number of retries, or the time for acknowledgements of existing tcp streams... this way you would not need to generate more traffic.
Also, when the connection first comes up you could try to resolve the address of a few of the root nameservers which don't change and if you don't get the correct response you can assume you're on a private network, perhaps needing a logon.
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