[plug] diald & options

[Brian Tombleson]

From: "John Breen" <jbreen at wn.com.au>
Sent: Friday, August 04, 2000 12:35 PM


> >> Actually, I was going to set up diald and allow demand dialling of
> >> the ISP, and use a cron job to fetch my mail.  If I tell sendmail

> >Yes, and No.  When sendmail receives a request, it usually tries to
verify
> >the DNS name of the recipient, so it sends a DNS lookup, which kicks
diald,
> >which brings your link up.  Kind of defeats the purpose of spooling it.
>
> AFAIR, it's not a sendmail option, it's a diald option.  Diald can be
> forced to ignore DNS lookup requests, and only come online for
> certain protocols...

I had a lot of trouble with diald on the one occassion in the past that I
tried to set it up.
The problem was this just like one, it wanted to dial all the time to check
things.  A user on the network opened their mail client or web browser and
it tried to dial, local DNS was also another prime offender.  So I don't
have specific advise here, but I do dvise considering a permanent connection
over diald as it will probably be cheaper in the long run.

I now use permanent dial-up in every situation where people are looking at
this as an option.  When I moved my home network to a Linux gateway on a
permanent connection, it cost me a little less than $1,100 (New phone line,
P100, Domain & ISP), but now my combined on-going costs are about $45 a
month, as opposed to the $120 a month for ISP+phone calls previous to
that... AND I get the full benefits of permanent connection and an Internet
server with anything I want to run (ftp, web, proxy, firewall, mail domain,
mailing lists, news, etc).

Ditch diald and fetchmail and run a gateway- or else keep it manually
dialing to keep costs down.

If anyone's interested, I now provide Linux internet gateways commercially
using this same method :)

On a different note, does anyone have an ADSL connection?  I'm not sure if
it actually in trail in Perth or not yet, but supposed to be available in
the next month or so and wondering if anyone has had expereince with it?

Brian Tombleson
Paradigm IT Consulting
www at ParadigmIT.com.au