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From: rick@vox.trystero.com (Richard E. Nickle)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: PPP
Date: 08 Aug 1994 16:17:55 GMT
Organization: The Internet Access Company
Lines: 68
Message-ID: <RICK.94Aug8121755@vox.trystero.com>
References: <30n5qj$3s1@portal.gmu.edu> <michaelv.774892571@ponderous.cc.iastate.edu>
<Cu0wsy.ExG@sneaky.lonestar.org>
NNTP-Posting-Host: vox.trystero.com
In-reply-to: gordon@sneaky.lonestar.org's message of Thu, 4 Aug 1994 18:31:45 GMT
In article <Cu0wsy.ExG@sneaky.lonestar.org> gordon@sneaky.lonestar.org (Gordon Burditt) writes:
Is there a way to get fully automatic PPP? I may be asking for the moon
here, but I'd like to be able to set up PPP so that the connection
is established and disconnected as needed.
- Routing is set up when the system is booted without necessarily needing
to set the link up at this point. Daemons get started as needed.
- The PPP connection is established when needed for useful traffic by
dialing an internet services provider and logging in. Provision is
made to try alternate numbers.
- The PPP connection is disconnected after a user-configurable period
of time (e.g. a few minutes) with no useful traffic.
- Traffic can be classified by user configuration into three types,
"useful", which calls for establishing or keeping established a PPP
link, "non-useful", which is allowed when the link is up already but
is not cause for establishing the link and gets dropped if the link is
down, and "forbidden", which is not allowed on the PPP link at all.
- Examples of "non-useful" traffic include broadcast messages, NTP, rwho,
and other stuff I haven't thought of that would generate periodic traffic
and keep the link up all the time without accomplishing much.
- Examples of "useful" traffic include SMTP, ftp, NNTP, nameserver queries,
telnet, and most other services.
- Examples of "forbidden" traffic would mostly depend on the security
environment, and might include incoming telnet, incoming ftp, etc.
- It should be possible to disconnect the link while keeping logical
connections alive. [SNIP-i thought NFS could handle this anyway]
- When the link isn't being used for PPP, it can be used for outgoing
UUCP or tip, incoming UUCP, or incoming PPP from the service provider
if the provider is willing to do that. If the link's not available
when needed, the packets get dropped and whatever sent them times
out eventually.
[some text deleted to fool stupid posting software]
Jim Avera has a package that does most of what you want for SVR4 SLIP
(not PPP). It's on ftp.tcp.com in /pub/SVR4/tslip*.
Basically, he does the dial-on-demand stuff (when a packet of an interactive
priority is queued, dial the SLIP server and connect, after a timeout
period with no traffic (configurable) disconnect.
I didn't really investigate it too much, because I basically abandoned
SVR4.03 after getting FreeBSD up (FreeBSD WREWLS!).
One other feature that was interesting was that he merged in code from
Taylor-UUCP to do the dialing, so you had all those neat Taylor dialing
scripts, and you could specify a system to talk to just by it's name
in the 'sys' file. So, 'slattach mypop' would be good enough to make
the attachment.
Another feature was the ability to QUEUE non-priority, non-interactive
traffic for whenever the connection was up. This looked like something
that wasn't really automatic, but you had to do by hand. I don't know
how useful it would be, but I think he was moving toward automation of
this queuing (for example, queuing things like mail transfers to take
place once the link was up).
The sources are almost exclusively built up from the base SLIP sources
that everyone uses, but the driver stuff is written for SVR4 STREAMS,
which might be a bitch to port.
Rick