On Sat, 13 Jun 2015, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
There is one thing I don't understand. Surely the above is exactly what will happen if you were to get stuck behind a captive portal with Firefox or any normal browser? But portals still work reliably for users.
You should visit more hotels. The number of different bugs and features has turned the phrase "hotel network" into a decoratory term. The interaction with normal browsers have their own weirdness. For example, if i use the url "1.2.3.4" at Starbucks, and go to another coffeeshop later on, and type 1.2.3.4 again, it shows me the cached starbucks page. While the SecondCup page uses some always reachable page, so I could pick it up from my browser history without actually needing to worry about DNS mangling, as my browser isn't using DNS because it is cached (to go to 10.128.128.128) A throw away browser with no DNS of WEB cache would really be preferred.
So either the browsers are doing a connectivity test similar to what you described (to a host with a DNS TTL of 0) and we have to do it too, or the portals are prepared to hijack TCP connections and not just DNS and we have no problem, or the portals just don't work reliably for browsers and portal-helper is an opportunity to fix that. Right...?
That would be logical. Hotel networks rarely are :P You're at the mercy of arp spoofing/poisoning, fragmentation, filtering, tranparant proxies, and some serious DNS protocol violations combined with a healthy dose of packet loss.
Anyway, once I understand this properly, I will file a bug upstream (or if you have a GNOME Bugzilla account, it would be better if you do so, to be CCed on responses). Thanks for catching this issue.
I am not sure, but if I do I haven't really used it. Paul -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
