Re: ./EuGTK/GtkEngine.e to Irv
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Apr 22, 2015
- 1942 views
What's the purpose of getting the ip address though? Just checking for a live internet connectino is different from getting the ip to host a public webserver or something, which is different again from hosting a local fileserver that's not visible beyon the local lan, etc etc. Maybe I'm not understanding the scope here.
My first reason for adding this function was so that I could use Eu to serve selected directories (music, mostly) to other wireless devices (phone, tablet, etc) via a wireless router - which has no internet connection. I needed the ip address so I could then assign a port: 8080, or whatever. See webserver.ex.
The second reason was so that I could avoid starting a browser and presenting the 'cannot connect' web page when someone clicks on a web link in a label or button. See test101.ex. More friendly to just pop up a message explaining that you can't get there from here.
The scope of the two reasons is different. The first one makes perfect sense and I see no problems.
However, the second one seems to be about internet connectivity. What if you are on a computer that's on a local lan with no internet conectivity - a lan that's isolated? You'd get an ip address so the check would pass, but then the browser would still present the 'cannot connect' web page. (Actually, this still isn't enough - you might be connected to the internet but still unable to access the web site for other reasons, such as Tier 1 de-peering. But maybe at that point, it's acceptable to have the browser be the one reporting the error.)
It seems like you'd actually want two separate checks - one to get the local ip address and one to check remote (i.e. internet) connectivity.
