GNetworkMonitor should be more clever about VPNs
@danw
Submitted by Dan Winship Link to original bug (#664563)
Description
In particular, private networks (eg, 10.0.0.0/8) are not routable via the public internet, so if you're trying to connect to an address on such a network, and you don't have a direct route to that network, then it doesn't matter whether or not you have a default route.
There could possibly be other tricks too, like trying to recognize split DNS situations (possibly via caching?). Maybe NM could be involved in this; eg, the VPN configuration could explicitly note what domain(s) the VPN is associated with, so that we know right away that certain hosts are unreachable when the VPN is down. (Though that wouldn't always work with laptops that are sometimes inside and sometimes outside the firewall.)