[Sugar-devel] [Dextrose] [DESIGN] Reflect internet connectivity in the 'Network' frame icon

[Samuel Greenfeld]

I'm pretty certain that the latest versions of Windows attempt to do
determine if they have Internet or just local access, contacting a
Microsoft server to see if they can reach it.

However I would not recommend doing this unless you have the resources
of Microsoft, or the permission to use the resources of someone who
does.  Netgear made the mistake of hardcoding the University of
Wisconsin's NTP server in a bunch of their earlier products.  Combined
with a bug this caused the university to get 150 Mb/sec (250,000
packets/second) of NTP queries coming at them.


This icon may also not be desirable on low-bandwidth connections, as
even pings from 20-30 laptops could become measurable amounts of billed
data.  Some school servers may also run offline proxies which can
request pages to be fetched from a remote online system later, and who
knows what our icon should show in that case.



On 02/10/11 15:20, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-02-10 at 12:46 -0300, Anish Mangal wrote: 
>> Hi,
>>
>> Currently, the 'network' icon on the frame tells us whether we're
>> connected to a network or not. Would it make sense for it to test for
>> internet connectivity and maybe reflect that by displaying a small
>> globe overlaid on the 'Network' icon?
> 
> Nice, but how do we determine if we have internet connectivity, by
> pinging a host such as activities.sugarlabs.org every now and then?
> 
> If it's sufficiently low-bandwidth, then I'd be in favor. Since no other
> OS currently does something similar, there's a high chance that this
> idea was already tried and found to be unfeasible.
>