Re: [3/3] Do something with trusted networks

["Robert G. Brown" <rgb phy duke edu>]

On Wed, 7 Jun 2006, Ted Lemon wrote:

> Robert Love wrote:
> > First, given no better options and a disconnected state, NM will now try
> > to blindly connect to trusted networks, round robin.  The idea being
> > that if your card is shitty or the network is hidden, you might not see
> > the network.  Also, on boot, NM does not have the network MAC addresses
> > and won't see any hidden networks.
> >
> > Second, trusted networks now persist in the scan list, even if NM does
> > not see them.  Like bookmarks or favorites.  This is useful if your card
> > is broken and cannot scan, if your card is broken and does not return
> > hidden networks, or if your network is hidden and you don't know all of
> > the MAC addresses.
> >
> > What we do here is debatable.  This is one such solution.
>
> It might be worth remembering a flag along with the trusted network data that 
> says whether or not the network was hidden.   Since the network interface is 
> presumably reasonably stable, you could skip testing the ones that previously 
> weren't hidden, and just provide the user with a way to say "try this one 
> again" if the network had become hidden after having been visible.
>
> Otherwise you could spend a noticeable amount of time hunting through a list 
> of networks if it's long.

I also am deeply grateful for all the work that has gone and is going
into NM.  It is pretty darn functional (for all that I whine about
missing functionality:-) and getting better.

To extend this idea, you might consider adding SEVERAL flags per
network, accessible either as attributes in the gconf xml or as tag
values of their own, all at the same time.  I can think of the following
attributes of "a wireless network" that one might want to control:

  trusted/not trusted
  hidden/not hidden
  whitelisted (always connect)/blacklisted (never connect)/ greylisted
   (decide to connect to in real-time only).  OK, so it's a trinary
   flag;-)
  connect priority (when given a choice of trusted, whitelisted networks
   at a given location, what order to you connect to them with?)
  vpn behavior control (always join, never join, sometimes join?
   dunno).

Also remember that the primary interface should ALWAYS pop up a
tell-me-twice warning when leaving a trusted and/or white network before
connecting to an untrusted and/or grey network.  One should never
discover oneself automagically added to a grey or untrusted network
without actively seeking to join.

Any others people can think of?

I often find that designing the actual GUI helps me think about what I
want to control or display associated with any given data object, which
in turn helps me design the object better than the other way around.
I'm working pretty hard on a gtk-based project right now, but I could
probably shake out some time to hack out a glade-2 window of controls.
I haven't got much experience at working with gconf per se but I'm
pretty good at doing raw XML with libxml2 (especially with xpath) and
have a nice stable of subroutines I've written to read and write xml, if
that would be any help.  That is, I could easily (1-2 days) write a tool
to directly control, edit, manipulate the contents of

 .gconf/system/networking/wireless/networks/

but I don't know exactly how to make my edits synchronize correctly with
gconf's picture of them, and if gconf provides an api for manipulating
them that keeps the two things in sync I'm clueless about it.

   rgb

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--
Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb phy duke edu