Re: diald

[Dirk.Eddelbuettel@qed.econ.queensu.ca]

  Tim>  Does anyone know how to get diald to work? I'm almost there; I can
  Tim> get it to do it's thing, dial, connect to my ISP, start sending data,
  Tim> but after about 30 seconds, diald kills pppd, and reports that it has
  Tim> timed out waiting for ppp to connect. :/ Since I was in the middle of
  Tim> receiving an html document from the web, I'd say it's safe to assume
  Tim> that pppd was already connected.  Anyone got any ideas how I can cure
  Tim> this VERY annoying problem?

Diald can be configured to do almost everything. Using it "out of the box"
with Eric Schenk's original /etc/diald.conf as packaged for Debian, I also
noticed that I could die after some seconds, claiming inactivity.

You can either modify to diald.conf so that it always stays up longer. What
I did was to add a this to /etc/ppp/ip-up 

	# send a couple of pings
	ping -c 20 -s 2048 -i 15 my.isp.provider >/dev/null

Recently, I created a fifo /etc/diald.fifo, set the option
	fifo /etc/diald.fifo 
in /etc/diald.options and wrote the following script to issue commands as
	$ dial force
etc. This is quite handy as a one-command interface for other scripts.

Hope this helps, Dirk

----------------- /usr/local/bin/dial ---------------------------------------
#!/bin/sh
#
# dial --- communicate via fifo `/etc/diald.fifo' with the diald daemon
#
# edd	12 Jul 96

if [ $# -ne 1 ] 
then
	echo "Usage: dial <command>"
	exit 1
fi
  
case "$1" in
  block|unblock|force|unforce|down|up|delay-quit|quit|reset|queue)
    echo $1 >> /etc/diald.fifo
    ;;
  *)
    echo "Unknown (or unsupported) command: $1"
    exit 1
    ;;
esac

exit 0


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--
Dirk Eddelb"uttel                             http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/~edd