Fwd: Rapid DHCP

[Nathaniel McCallum]

On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 1:38 PM, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:
> On 08/03/2011 01:19 PM, Dan Williams wrote:
>> The Ubuntu NM maintainer has posted a WIP patch that makes NM say it's
>> connected immediately if at least one of IPv4 or IPv6 completes.
>> Currently if both are enabled, NM won't say it's connected until both
>> are done (and result in either success or failure).  That at least
>> speeds up the perceived connection speed, which isn't a bad thing.
>
> Nice, that will help almost everybody, but possibly it could break
> somebody who's depending explicitly on IPv6 (or IPv4 in the other case)
> for an app and now thinks the network is up.
>
> How do apps, e.g. Thunderbird, know when they're online?  dbus, /sys?
>
> If this change happens, there ought to be a way for that small slice of
> apps to check to see that the stack they demand is really up, if they're
> depending on it (more directly than parsing text output of userland
> tools).  Probably this already exists, right?

It seems like NM's state transitions need to become more explicit.
1. IPv4 connected
2. IPv6 connected
3. "internet" connected (including proxy discovery)

Nathaniel