Re: Add support for disabling connectivity checking via D-Bus API

[James Henstridge <james jamesh id au>]

On 25 July 2017 at 21:58, Thomas Haller <thaller redhat com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2017-07-24 at 17:04 +0800, James Henstridge wrote:
>
> Hi James,
>
> > We're looking at enabling NetworkManager's connectivity checking in
> > the next Ubuntu release, and one of the concerns has been privacy
> > issues of regularly pinging a particular server while users are
> > online.  One option is to include the connectivity check
> > configuration
> > in a separate package that the user can uninstall, but that isn't
> > particularly discoverable.
>
> This is what we do on Fedora (NetworkManager-config-connectivity-fedora
> package). But I think Lubomir dislikes that because (if I represent his
> view correctly) we abuse the package management system for
> configuration. I don't have a strong opinion: it works.

We'll probably end up putting our connectivity check config in a
separate binary package too, if only to minimise the detla with
Debian.

The main reason I looked into this was that I didn't like the other
idea for making this user configurable: having the privacy control
panel install and uninstall the package containing the config.  This
would either be an Ubuntu-only patch, or need to let you configure
which package name holds the connectivity configuration and only work
on systems where the connectivity config is packaged by itself.  Also,
requiring that you be online in order re-enable connectivity checking
sounds like it would be asking for trouble.

Adding the API to NetworkManager looked like it would be more reliable
and make the GUI changes simpler.


> > I had a go at implementing an alternative approach, that I attached
> > to
> > this bug report:
> >
> > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=785117
> >
> > This adds two D-Bus properties:
> >
> > ConnectivityCheckAvailable: true if a connectivity URI has been
> > configured (read-only)
> > ConnectivityCheckEnabled: true if connectivity checking is enabled
> > (read/write)
> >
> > The second is implemented by setting the connectivity check interval
> > to 0 in NetworkManager-intern.conf.
> >
> > The idea is that a privacy control panel could optionally show an
> > extra toggle if ConnectivityCheckAvailable is true, and have that
> > toggle control ConnectivityCheckEnabled.  The change will be
> > persistent, and doesn't require installing/removing files under
> > /etc/NetworkManager.
> >
> > Does this look like a sensible way to implement this feature?  If so,
> > I can move on to add support for it in gnome-control-center.
>
> It does. Let's discuss this further on the gnome bugzilla entry.

Okay.

James.