Hi,
On Sat, Nov 25, 2017 at 2:21 PM, Gert Doering <g...@greenie.muc.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Sat, Nov 25, 2017 at 12:27:10PM -0500, Selva Nair wrote:
> > Thanks for summarising the status and proposals for echo commands.
>
> I missed something in your list, which *I* would like to see for
> my users - a way to send a message to the GUI to display in a popup
> window, intended for the users to see.
>
Yeah, this discussion started from a question about such a feature but was
forgotten in this initial effort to "standardize" echo commands so that the
same command would work on various UI's.
Let's revive it for the selfish reason that I too am interested in having
this :)
> Examples could be stuff like
>
> "you are using a server that will be going away soon, please get
> an updated profile from your system administrator"
>
> (like, when having to migrate due to CA rollover)
>
> or
>
> "your OpenVPN is old and has known security issues, please migrate
> to version 2.4.4"
>
> or even
>
> "please change your Tunnelblick settings to enable OpenVPN 2.4,
> for better performance and less battery usage (AEAD)"
>
>
> (typically controlled by a --client-connect script on the server side
> which looks at incoming IV_ attributes and decides what to send, whether
> to send it on every connect or just once a week, etc. - but that's
> somewhat out of scope, just to give a bit more background on what I think
> how I'd use it)
>
>
> Originally, I thought
>
> push echo 'my message'
>
> would do exactly this, but I've since learned that this is more
> complicated,
> so we'll need to define a message type
>
> push echo 'message this is my message'
>
How about
echo "msg this is my message"
OR
echo "motd this is my message"
IIRC, the max length of a line that openvpn command parser accepts is
255 bytes, so the above will allow ~237 bytes in the message, accounting for
5 bytes for adding "push ". We could just say any thing that the command
parser
will accept on the server side (if pushed) or client side is acceptable.
For longer messages, we could allow concatenation of multiple messages as
well as a
echo "msg-title my title"
to set a custom title for the message display window.
> or something, agree on max length, encoding, dialog behaviour (shall it
> be a tray message or non-modal dialog thing? do we want to have options to
> select either?)...
>
As for encoding everything in the config file and lines transferred across
the
management interface are is assumed to be in utf-8, so use the same for this
as well. That means the Windows GUI, e.g., will convert the message to
ucs-16 before display.
How to display the message need not be standardized and be left to the
implementation
as the best approach depends on the OS and will evolve with time. However,
the GUI
could have a user-defined setting that disables messages and/or opts for
notify vs modal
dialog etc. Again an implementation detail.
When to display the message --- after successful connection or as soon as
the
echo is received?
> Since I'm just a demanding user, I leave the specifics of that to you :-)
> (I'm sure Arne will have some ideas as well)
I want this feature too, I too go please ahead and demand and critique more
so that
something will get done sooner than later..
Selva
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