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

[Samuel Greenfeld]

I believe (but am not 100% certain) that I read somewhere that the 
Microsoft approach uses HTTP.  This likely is because if you are using 
an HTTP proxy, you may not have external DNS resolution or pinging ability.

As far routers go, I don't know how many of them try to be smart and 
indicate full internet connectivity, while others may just acknowledge 
they have an active working DHCP lease or PPPoE connection.  Most 
routers still try to use NTP to set their own clocks from the Internet 
so they could use that too, but hopefully they are a lot saner about 
using NTP than they used to be.

What I'd like to avoid with this feature is falsely claiming Sugar is 
offline, and having some activity (Get Books, etc.), refuse to function 
because it thinks (incorrectly) it cannot do anything.  We can warn if 
we want, but we don't want to be persistent about warning if a 
deployment is screwy to the point users ignore Sugar messages entirely.


On 02/10/11 18:50, Peter Robinson wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 8:20 PM, Bernie Innocenti<bernie at codewiz.org>  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?
> A DNS lookup of some centralised host would likely be enough. Some
> networks don't allow ping so its likely that won't be a good check.
> Name lookup is a fairly reasonable indication that you have some form
> of network connectivity.
>
> Peter
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