Re: Feature proposal: combined system status menu

[Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de>]

On Mon, 22.04.13 15:58, Bastien Nocera (hadess hadess net) wrote:

> On Mon, 2013-04-22 at 15:50 +0200, Frederic Crozat wrote:
> > 2013/4/22 Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>:
> <snip>
> > > However, while switching wi-fi networks will require an extra step, I
> > > actually think that the the experience will be better with the new
> > > design. The current network menu contains a lot of information that
> > > isn't related to wi-fi, and isn't exactly straightforward to use - in
> > > many respects, the new design will be more straightforward to use,
> > > even if there is an extra click involved. Also, we are planning a new
> > > wi-fi selection dialog, which should be a big improvement in those
> > > situations where you are not already connected to a network.
> >
> > My main concern is the detection of "application needs network" and
> > how it will properly integrate without
> > modifying all applications so they interact with NetworkManager to
> > request "I need network access".
>
> That can be implemented as a kernel feature with a user-space helper,
> very much in the same way that "fieryfilter", a desktop-ish firewall
> akin to what exists on Windows, used to do it:
> http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/fieryfilter/screenshots/fieryfilter-0.2-connection.png
>
> We might even get help from the original author ;)
> (The code there is likely not the way it would be finally implemented,
> the kernel infrastructure has changed quite a bit since 2008)

Hmm, this gives me a bit of a headache... Hooking this into the firewall
sounds like a questionabble place. We probably want something where we
can get notifications about any unroutable, locally generated traffic,
and we'd need meta data such as the PID for it, and we don't want to
change the routing decision for it. I am not sure we could hack this up
with the firewall... But humm, something to think about, and see whether
some other place in the IP stack might provide us with what we need for
this...

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.