At my University, the wireless networks are secured with Perfigo/Cisco Clean Access. This is all well and good, but it gets annoying having to launch a web browser to sign into the captive portal each time I connect to the network. It's made even more annoying by the fact that many programs (liferea, pidgen, Thunderbird, etc.) try to connect before I login, and either end up connecting to the captive portal, or getting blocked. Either way, it's annoying.
I'm now looking into using DBus and a script/program to wait 'til I connect to one of a couple of wireless networks, then automatically authenticate using the captive portal for me. I'm still researching, but it seems that Network Manager (gnome network connection management applet) has DBus interface, like most gui programs these days. After a quick peak around my system, I didn't see it registered to DBus, but I don't really know what I'm doing yet.
I'm thinking about writing the script in Python, as my first real attempt at useful python code (other than my vPython work in physics lab 3+ years ago.) We'll see how it goes.
As a side note: I'm quite tired of network manager applet for many reasons, and am looking for a decent replacement. Any suggestions?
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I recently did a post about wicd on my blog. Read it. I'm not raving about wicd, but I like it.
ReplyDeleteI haven't tried it, but under each network, under the preferences, there is a "Scripts" option. So I think you can probably set up scripts that get called by wicd as soon as the network is connected. I think this is just what you would need.
I'd recommend using Python. (wicd is written in Python, but I don't think that's particularly relevant.)