Premature Optimization

I normally don’t write about work. The reason is that I feel that the slight chance that someone might feel I’m being biased towards a product that comes from the company I work for and dismiss my thoughts as “guerilla marketing” is not worth it.

However, I’m going to make an exception - and that’s because I prefer selling Zend here rather than doing it on Lukas Smith’s blog

Lukas raises the question of what commercial PHP distribution should be used as an alternative to RHEL outdated packages. My answer on that would be, surprisingly - use Zend Server! (well, …once it’s out of beta, of course).

Lets put the features and SLA you get from Zend Server aside for a moment.

The real reason I think you should use Zend Server is because the Zend Server product manager (hey, that’s me!) reads your blog. I’m serious about this.

I’m not sure I can quantify this, but I think that a vendor that listens so closely to what potential users (and the community) has to say is worth quite a lot in the long run. And yes, Zend has not been perfect in listening to the community - but I can honestly and whole-heartedly say that we are trying harder. The recent feedback on Zend Server gives me the feeling that we are doing ok too.

One of the cafés in my area where I frequently drink / work requires you to pass through an annoying web page forcing you to agree to some terms before allowing you to access the Internet through their Wifi network. It's free - but they still annoy you with this silly HTTP gateway. This is actually a frequent thing in Israel - most cafés offer free Wifi access, but some will require to to log-in nevertheless.

So today I figured out how to get NetworkManager to automatically work around this HTTP gateway for me whenever I connect to Arcaffe's Wifi network. Since it's super cool, and since I bet lots of people are annoyed by these sort of Wifi gateways, here's how to do it:

Apparently, NetworkManager allows you to create special post-connect or post-disconnect scripts that are executed when a network interface is brought up or down. Here is what I did:

I Created the following script and saved it at /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/100httpgateway.sh:

Don't forget to make the file executable - I did it by running chmox +x /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/100httpgateway.sh.

Some things you should note:

• "012-ArCaffe" is the ESSID of the network I'm logging in to. This of course work for ArCaffe in Israel, but you should change that with your network's ESSID.
• Replace the value of IFACE with the name of your wireless interface
• $1, the first parametter passed by NetworkManager to the script, is the network interface that was just connected or disconnected
• $2, the second parameter, is "up" or "down" - the status of the interface.
• The code I have inside the case block is where the magic happens. In this case, I send an HTTP POST with the correct parameters, Cookie and Referer headers and URL. This causes ArCaffe's gateway to log me in
• I use curl - but I could have also used wget or any other tool to do the job
• The -d flag sends the POST data, the -H flags set a header
• I figured exactly what request to send using LiveHttpHeaders - but you can also use tcpflow or any other packet sniffing or HTTP sniffing tool
• You can add more options to the 'case' statement for more networks that need that sort of treatment. With a little of bash-fu that should be no problem.

That's it! Man I love Linux today