*BSD News Article 94386


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From: conrads@neosoft.com (Conrad Sabatier)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: How to keep ISP from killing ppp connection
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 1997 17:18:26 -0500
Organization: NeoSoft, Inc.
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[ posted and mailed ]

In article <335CC5C4.FDEFA390@cabl.com>,
	Rick Goldeck <webmaster@cabl.com> writes:
> I'm paying for a dedicated dialup line from my ISP, but
> they timeout ALL accounts after 15 mins. of inactivity.
> 
> I've searched freebsd.org and the only solution found
> was to repeatedly ping somewhere on the net.
> 
> Does anyone do anything a little more elegant? I noticed
> with ppp run with -auto option that Apache would cause
> a dialout every so often, and sendmail may do the same?
> Is there a setting to change one of these down to 15 mins.
> or so just to keep the connection alive?

Sure.  In /etc/sysconfig, you can modify the sendmail flags.
The default is to send all queued mail every thirty minutes.

Only problem is: what if there's nothing in the queue?  :-)

> I know this effectively does the same thing as ping, but
> I'm a bit obsessive... Opinions on the "right" way to use
> ping for this would also be appreciated.

Ping sounds like the simplest solution.  Just set it up as a cron job to
run, say, every ten minutes.  Do specify a specific number of packets, of
course (you don't want it to just ping forever!), and "quiet" mode would
probably be a good idea, too, since you're not really interested in the
output anyway:

#ping every ten minutes, tossing final output
*/10 * * * * /sbin/ping -q -c 1 host > /dev/null #toss final output

-- 
Conrad Sabatier		http://www.neosoft.com/~conrads