mintUpdate behind a proxy - Intended behavior?

[Wershlak]

I'm new to Mint and loving Julia so far. I was playing with Fedora and Ubuntu previously but liked the menu and look of Mint. I really like mintUpdate. The different levels and the ability to ignore specific packages is great to help a newb like me understand what I need to update.

However, the "Internet check" while i'm at work (and behind a proxy) can be annoying. It took me a while to get updates working as my initial thought when it failed was that mintUpdate somehow wasn't using my system proxy settings. I eventually found the "internet check" under preferences and input the address for my loopback0 to fool the software.

This works but it still takes the software a minute and a half to do an Internet check. I turned on wireshark and see my system still sends a couple DNS requests for google.com and then tries to do an HTTP get to the google IP address (not going through the proxy). Eventually this times out and it tries again... After a couple tries it pings the loopback and then moves on.

So, my question then: Is this the intended behavior or do I have something borked in a config file somewhere? And the follow up question: Is this internet check really needed? presumably if I'm not connected to the internet i'll get an error that Update is unable to contact the repositories. No harm no foul right? Or would this possibly cause some harm to the system?

[dawgdoc]

The internet check procedure has been changed for mintUpdate in Linux Mint 11, Katya. I am not sure if the updates to mintUpdate will be available for Julia. This feature has been applied to the mintUpdate available for LMDE, which I am using.

from the What's New portion of the release notes for Katya

The Update Manager

The Update Manager is faster than before. It used to check your Internet connection, update its rules and look for package updates. Thanks to some refactoring and code changes it now only looks for package updates. The rules (which define the safety level for each package) are now embedded within the Update Manager and no longer need to be downloaded. When a new version of the rules is available, a new version of the Update Manager is released. The Update Manager then ignores all other updates. Afer updating itself it is restarted, so you're always using the latest Update Manager with the latest rules and it doesn't need to check the rules every time it looks for updates. The result is a safer yet faster Update Manager.