[plug] ADSL failover

[Arkem]

> A friend of mine is setting up a linux box to act as a gateway for a small
> network. He plans on getting ADSL, as well as a dialup account (due to ADSL's
> problematic nature).

Well I'm with Bigpond DSL and have had very few problems, though
admitiedly I'm not getting 100% uptime, I'm getting maybe an hour a
month of interupted service.

> Has anyone written/heard of a script which will automatically dial
> in after ADSL fails (plus a few retries)?

I have written a tiny (mostly untested script) that monitors the adsl
(by pinging a telstra server and checking with a rp-pppoe (a good
pppoe client) adsl-status) and periodically tries to reconnect. Though
the script would probably be better implemented as a cron job I hadn't
thought of that at the time. If you are interestested I could send
you a copy. Possibly it would also work in conjunction with
/etc/ppp/ip-down.d or put in /etc/network/interfaces as a post-down
instruction but these methods have failed for me in the past
(probably through my own ignorance) so I use what works (or appears
to anyway). Another option (assuming that you don't want to host
anything) is using rp-pppoe's dial on demand feature which would just
connect when it's needed.

I've not the faintest idea how routing or alternate dial-up/adsl
would work but I hope the above is of some help.

Regards
	Paul Chamberlain