Qubes-aware network manager applet/widget

[rootkovska]

For Qubes 4.x we would like to implement a simple "stub", nm-applet-like, widget for Xfce4 for Qubes-aware networking management. Such a widget is envisioned to find out (using core API) which of the VMs is the default NetVM for the user (advanced users might of course have more than one) and offer a way to connect/disconnect to the wireless network selected by the user. In addition it might handle special-purpose ProxyVMs, such as the default Tor VM or the default VPN VM (e.g. in a corporate edition of Qubes). It should also display any error messages, such as "unrecoverable problem with your netVM", etc. (in case our Health Monitoring Daemon - see #2134 - couldn't resolve on its own).

In the future it should be easy to port it to Gnome when (if) we wanted to move to this shell in some future version of Qubes.

[andrewdavidwong]

Would this include network traffic monitoring? We receive frequent requests on the mailing lists for that sort of functionality. Here are some recent example threads:

• https://groups.google.com/d/topic/qubes-users/PzNsckTszRM/discussion
• https://groups.google.com/d/topic/qubes-users/CJzwmcOR-Jk/discussion
• https://groups.google.com/d/topic/qubes-users/JWtELZAnqRk/discussion
• https://groups.google.com/d/topic/qubes-users/LOSEqTh35Ew/discussion
• https://groups.google.com/d/topic/qubes-users/82XURHJzZF4/discussion