[H-GEN] Remote start of ppp/chat/wvdial

[Robert Brockway]

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On Sun, 28 Apr 2002, Scott Pullen wrote:

> I have just purchased a dinosaur that will be acting as my 
> proxy/firewall/backup server and was wondering if any of you know of a 
> utility that will allow me to initiate a dialup connection from the 
> (future) proxy to the internet from another box on my home network. I 
> don't want to set up a on demand connection i.e. everytime something not 
> on one of my boxes causes the proxy to dial out as I don't have a 
> dedicated line or the money for spurious calls.

If you use dial on demand using diald you can setup a strict ruleset so
only certain types of traffic (web, for example) initiate the connection.
The debugging phase of this can involve more than a few spurious calls
though.

There is a tool available which has windows & unix clients and is designed
to allow for remote activation of the ppp link though a daemon running on
the linux box which calls your ppp script. Basically when a user wants to
use the net they tell their client that they want the link to be active. 

The server counts the number of people who want the link to be active &
keeps it up as long as that value is greater than 0.  When the last person
is finished using the net it shuts the link down.

For the life of me I can't recall what it is caller but I'm sure it is not
the masqdialer that Michael Anthon just mentioned.  It may well have
similiar capabilities of course.  Gary Curtis put me on to this little
tool.  Gary, what was it called? :)

So the bottom line is great tools to do this do exist.  I still kind of
prefer diald with a really tight ruleset.
Cheers,
	-Rob

-- Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org  ICQ: 104781119
   Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
   blake: up 108 days, 13:18, 11 users,  load average: 1.02, 1.03, 1.01
   "The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah



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