Re: Question on adding some network-related features.

On 02/23/2013 03:23 PM, Patrick McManus wrote:
> Hi Ben - I've appreciated your linux networking contributions over the
> years - nice to see you on a firefox list!

Thanks!  I'm probably just passing through...just need a way to
make firefox be able to auto-login to wifi portals for a test
system.  Seems web portals have gotten just a little bit too clever
to easily do this with curl these days...


> On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Ben Greear <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Hello!
>>
>> I am interested in extending firefox so that it can bind to a specific
>> local IP address (and network interface on Linux, using SO_BINDTODEVICE).
>
> that's something I could get behind.

I implemented it with environment variables so I didn't have
to figure out how to get the config arguments properly passed
down to the socket code.

It's a bit of a hack, but I am not sure I have the time or
interest in doing much more.  Maybe someone with more knowledge
of mozilla infrastructure can improve on the patches...

>> I am also interested in adding c-ares support so I have better control
>> over DNS requests.
>
> as jason said, we're moving towards libunbound with some alacrity..
> can you do what you need in that framework?

It does not appear to offer all that I want.  I'd want to bind
to local interface, not just IP address, and more importantly,
there does not seem to be a way to specify that a particular
DNS server be used by a particular process.  I'm going to have hundreds
of wifi station interfaces, and will need to do portal-login on
each of them using whatever DNS that particular virtual station
is configured for....

>> Are these features something that might be accepted upstream?
>>
>> If so, are command-line arguments an acceptable way to allow
>> such configuration?
>
> that's probably not the best approach.. firefox is just one app that
> uses gecko/necko so the functionality would not be reachable in other
> apps or if the firefox-app team went away from arguments or whatever
> in the future.. doing it through prefs is better.. probably a new
> method in http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/netwerk/base/public/nsISocketTransportService.idl
> which the pref user would call.

Do you normally post patches to mailing lists for review, or do I need
to open a bugzilla bug and attach a patch there?

Either way, can you suggest a good reference for the 'hg' commands
needed to create patches, etc?  Is there anything like stgit for hg?

Thanks,
Ben


-- 
Ben Greear <[email protected]>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com