139141 - Ability to signal Mozilla to go offline remotely

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core Graveyard :: X-remote, enhancement)

Description

[Joakim Recht]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.9+) Gecko/20020414
BuildID:    2002041421

Often, I've forgotten to shut down mozilla or go offline before I go to work,
which causes it to download mail at home, and then they're not available at
work. I could just kill the mozilla running at home, but a nicer option would be
if I could signal it to go offline, either with a kill signal or through x-remote.

Comment 1

[John Levon]

No dupe found ... personally this sounds a bit like featuritis to me ...

Comment 2

[gabriel]

No, to me it's not featuritis. It sounds like it would actually be very
valuable. For example, the command to put Mozilla into online/offline mode could
be added to network startup/shutdown scripts. There may be other cases where
you'd need to put mozilla into offline mode, eg. if you are doing something like
updating a cache server.

Comment 3

[Philip White]

This feature would have to be only available on Linux, since only Linux (and 
*nix-like systems) allow you to manage processes remotely.  That would subtract 
from Mozilla's portability.

A good solution to a problem like this would be to use a VNC server on your 
workstation.  VNC is available for most operating systems, and allow you to 
completely manage your graphical system remotely.

Comment 4

[Kai Lahmann (is there, where MNG is)]

Philip:
I think, I've seen a telnet-server in w2k... am I wrong?

Comment 5

[Philip White]

You're probably right, but I seriously doubt that it lets you manage processes.

If the telnet server anything like VanDyke's Vshell server
(http://vandyke.com/products/vshell/), it just gives you remote access to
cmd.exe, Windows' Command Prompt.

Comment 6

[Rob North]

I agree with gabriel, for a Linux user, it's an extremely useful feature.
I've been meaning to submit this as a feature request or about 3 months!

Comment 7

[gabriel]

Yes, since there is already a 'mozilla -remote' command on *nix, a lot of the
framwork for this is probably already in place.

Comment 8

[Philip White]

No dups found, and this enhancement already has some backers... confirming it.

Comment 9

[benc]

I don't understand. 

If the files are downloaded to home, what is the point of killing the instance
running at home?

Comment 10

[Andrew Schultz]

> if I could signal it to go offline, either with a kill signal or through 
> x-remote.

kill -STOP MOZILLA_PID
?

In fact, the scenario described in comment 0 would be impossible via X-Remote
because of lacking X permissions.

Comment 11

[Michał J. Gajda]

I suggest that Mozilla remote would best allow both going offline and _online_.
On Unix, it would enable switching online and offline in network interface
up/down scripts.
On Windows, you can also write simple app to run scripts when interface goes
up/down.

It would allow to mimick IE functionality of automatically detecting if network
is up or down.

If Mozilla remote is implementable on other platforms - I would suggest adding
it in architecture list (now - just Linux, probably at least all Unix platforms). 

Comment 12

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Mass resolving a bunch of old bugs in the x-remote component in preparation for archiving it. If this bug is still valid and useful, please move it to the "Toolkit: Startup and Profile System" component and reopen it.