Show HN: Rust Library to check your Internet connectivity

Re:Show HN: Rust Library to check your Internet connectivity by TD-Linux on Tuesday May 28, 2019 @04:59AM (#20028380)

There are a lot better websites to ping for this, that are used for captive portal detection. E.g. Chromium uses http://clients3.google.com/generate_204 and Firefox uses http://detectportal.firefox.com/success.txt.

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Re:Show HN: Rust Library to check your Internet connectivity by bspammer on Tuesday May 28, 2019 @05:09AM (#20028418)

Am I right in thinking that either of those pages going down would result in "Sign in to your network" dialogs being shown in every single instance of their respective browsers? That's crazy.

I mean I know this is google we're talking about, their uptime is second-to-none, but that still seems like a hell of a dependency.

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Re:Show HN: Rust Library to check your Internet connectivity by OskarS on Tuesday May 28, 2019 @05:23AM (#20028479)

I doubt it. I think these are for detecting whether or not you're in a "captive portal". I.e. airport wifi that requires you to enter login credentials or something.

But hey, give it a whirl: block detectportal.firefox.com with your hosts file and see what happens.

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Re:Show HN: Rust Library to check your Internet connectivity by baud147258 on Tuesday May 28, 2019 @09:03AM (#20029557)

I gave it a try, I didn't see any difference.

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Re:Show HN: Rust Library to check your Internet connectivity by praseodym on Tuesday May 28, 2019 @06:48AM (#20028832)

No it does not. It will only show that dialog if the page returns anything different than the expected response, exactly like a captive portal would.

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Re:Show HN: Rust Library to check your Internet connectivity by sgeisler on Tuesday May 28, 2019 @05:56AM (#20028622)

That could even be used to return an enum instead of bool: Online, CaptivePortal with the URL as member and Offline.

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