Re: Waiting for scripts in /etc/ppp/ip-up.d
I've had a number of suggestions now, thanks to all who replied.
However, I've still got some problems.
First - for all those who suggested fetchmail, thanks but I am aware of
fetchmail, and it just does not do what I need. The reasons are complex
but conclusive... [If anybody really wants to discuss why I don't want
to use fetchmail, contact me off the list and I'll explain more]
The nice suggestion was diald, which I tried to set up last night. I had
some problems with it, though. I set it up to run the existing
/usr/bin/pon and /usr/bin/poff scripts to start up and shut down the PPP
link (I did it this way because I have this configuration set up nicely,
thanks to pppconfig, and I didn't want to start from scratch - if
there's an equivalent of pppconfig for setting up diald, then I'm
interested, but otherwise not. I see no reason to reinvent the wheel
here...)
First problem was that I can't do the necessary "kill -HUP <diald-pid>"
to force the link up unless I am root. I don't really want a setuid root
script to do this... Also, getting the PID of diald is (slightly) tricky
in a script. Never mind, I can fix this up when everything else is
working...
The second problem is the big one - Demon dropped the line on me (for no
reason I could see :-() while my slrnpull session was under way. Diald
proceeded to restart the link, as expected. Great. BUT, when the link
came up again, diald started a SECOND copy of slrnpull (as per the
ip-up.d scripts). This is definitely *not* right :-(
Worst of all, because the link was started by diald, I couldn't stop it
using poff - the process isn't owned by me. I pulled the plug on the
modem as a quick fix...
I've come to the conclusion that the best way of doing what I'm after is
to dial up manually, using pon. This is no problem. Diald doesn't really
offer me anything extra here, as I basically don't want to dial up on
demand... BUT, once I am online, I'd like to be able to get at the bit
of diald's functionality which monitors the link, and hangs up
(preferably using poff) when the link goes idle for a specified length
of time.
Can diald be persuaded to do this (hangup-only, no dialup function)? If
not, how do I get at the ppp link stats to monitor packets going
through? If I can monitor packets/sec across the ppp link, or maybe
traffic over the modem, I could write my own monitor-and-timeout
program.
Thanks for the help so far,
Paul.
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