Re: Handle HTTP error 511 Network Authentication Required (standard secure proxy authentification/captive portal detection)

From: Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot@laposte.net>
Date: Feb 20, 2012, 15:34 UTC
Message-ID: <e1d3ddd965eb32717163aaa87fa71e17.squirrel@arekh.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20120220135639.GA5131@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Le Lun 20 février 2012 14:56, Jeff King a écrit :

Show 14 quoted lines

> On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 06:38:54AM +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
>
>> > As a non-browser client, what should git do? We can't make sense of the
>> > content at http://login.corporatenetwork, which is most likely an HTML
>> > form asking for credentials (or even money, if the captive portal is
>> > something like a public wireless provider). The best we can probably do
>> > is die and say "apparently you need to go http://login.corporatenetwork
>> > in a browser before making your request".
>>
>> Actually, the best would be to launch something capable of interpreting html
>> forms on the url given by the error.
>
> Doing that portably is near impossible (keep in mind that git runs on
> things like antique versions of Solaris).

Can't the you let the user specify a browser command (firefox, elinks w3m) to auto-feed the portal page to when needed ?

The main problem with captive portals is when they shut down the connection and the user has no idea how to restore it (and error 511 is intended to fix this, but that won't do a lot of good if the user does is not shown the captive portal url transmitted with the error)

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot