Re: Configuring Pine for multiple ISPs
On Thu, 9 Mar 2000, Jason Christensen wrote:
> How handy are you with text processing scripting languages (i.e. Perl,
> awk, etc.)?
>
> My thought is that you could create a script that edits your .pinerc file
> prior to starting pine. The script could look at another file
This is "last resort" as I don't want to have to restart pine every time
the link changes.
> (/etc/resolv.conf maybe) for domain info that was set by your connection
> software. I know that dhcpcd sets the domain in my resolv.conf. I'm not
> sure what pppd does as it has been a couple of years since I have used it.
It doesn't do anything, to my knowledge.
> My guess is that it needs to set a domain parameter somewhere, possibly in
> resolv.conf. You should be able to use that in your script.
Well, the domain, plus the server name, are known at startup. The job is
to get this information to pine when it wants to send a mail.
>
> There may be an easier way to do it. Scripting within Pine perhaps to do
> exactly what you discuss below. Read an environmental var and to set the
> SMTP server parameter.
Well, the environment variable poses a problem, as I don't know how to
have the "et" script set those variables in all user processes runing
pine.
For the purposes of a test, I have tried something that I don't expect to
work, but...
In the configuration screen of Pine, I changed the smtp specification line
to read `cat /usr/share/smtp/smtp.conf`.
And sure enough, this didn't work ;-)
What would really be useful would be some way to indirectly specify the
contents of a configuration item in pine (in particular, this
configuration item), but that doesn't seem to be possible. It looks like
I'm left with hacking the .pinerc file ;-(
At the moment it is easier to simply log into the ISP providing the mail
server I need at the moment rather than make pine track them. I have an
account on my machine for each ISP address and pop the mail to those
separate mailboxes. So using pine as dwarf42 gives me a configuration for
my EarthLink account, while loging in as dwarf gives a pine that uses the
server at TalStar. Whichever account the machine is currently logged into,
that user's pine will function correctly while the other one will not.
Switching back and forth between the two ISPs, while not difficult is a
bit obnoxious. It would be much nicer to have pine track the right server.
Is there any kind of simple smtp transfer program that pine could be
pointed at on the local machine that could be aware of the correct server
to direct the mail to from a config file? Please don't tell me sendmail or
qmail or some other gigantic full featured MTA. I guess I could duplicate
pine's smtp interface with some added configuration capability...hmmm,
wonder how hard it would be to modify pine directly, but the license makes
such modification hard to promote... anyway, where would I find the needed
time ;-)
Thanks for the help, although it looks like I'll have to cope with less
than I wished.
Luck,
>
> Jason
>
> On Thu, 9 Mar 2000, Dale Scheetz wrote:
>
> > I just added a second ISP to my resources, and I can seem to manage
> > everything but smtp for pine. In the pine configuration there is a slot to
> > put the smtp server, but I can only use the server provided by the ISP
> > that I am logged into at the time, as neither one allows relays. I can
> > reconfigure every time, but that's pretty obnoxious.
> >
> > I set up my ppp connection with a script called "et" that takes commands
> > of the form "et phone <peer>" (naturally my normal peer is "home" ;-)
> > This script also moves the proper resolv.conf file into /etc/resolv.con so
> > that the proper search path and name servers are used for each connection.
> > What I would like to do is let this script set some kind of system
> > variable that Pine would recognize as the smtp server name. Can anyone
> > tell me how to get pine to recognize such a variable, or some other
> > possible technique?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Dwarf
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe debian-user-request@lists.debian.org < /dev/null
> >
> >
>
>
>
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