[plug] e-smith anyone?

[Craig Foster]

Sorry, laplinking at the same time slows down thought as well as the computer :(

During installation, or looking through the admin console (Screen F1 or ssh in as admin:*insertpasswordhere*) there is an option to set timeouts for dialup. These consist of business hours, weekdays out of hours, and weekends. This overrides all retry-timout settings. Otherwise, I can think of two ways :-

1) By using diald options - eg (from 'man diald')

"redial-backoff-start
   Specifies  the  number  of  consecutive failures to connect allowed before diald starts doubling the delay between dialing attempts after each attempt. This command can be used to prevent diald from overwhelming the phone lines when the remote side is extremely busy. If this command is not specified redial-back­ off-start  is  taken  to be infinity, which effectively turns off the backoff algorithm.  When redial-backoff-start is set, diald will use redial-timeout as the delay between each of the first redial-backoff-start unsuccessful calls.  After this diald will double the timeout after each failure, up to a limit  of redial-backoff-limit seconds.  A successful connection resets the backoff algorithm.
"
and
"       dial-fail-limit
              Sets the maximum number of consecutive failed connection attempts diald will allow.  If this limit is exceeded diald will block further connections until an "unblock" command is issued on the command FIFO.  If this is set to 0 diald will not enforce any limit.  The default value is 0.  When this condition occurs diald will issue the following message to the system logs:
      "Too many dialing failures in a row. Blocking connection."
This command is intended for use at sites that need to avoid the possibility of diald attempting a large number of long distance phone calls  to  a  machine that  is  not operating correctly. Once diald blocks the connection an operator can investigate the cause, correct the problem, and then issue the "unblock" command to allow diald to continue. The link may be manually opened while blocked but will not open on demand until it has been unblocked.
"

Don't forget that e-smith recreates "/etc/diald.conf" from the fragments in "/etc/e-smith/templates/etc/diald.conf" and as such any changes you make may be overwritten next time the templates are expanded. To recreate diald.conf from the fragments, use -
"/sbin/e-smith/expand-template /etc/diald.conf"

2) or have a hack at Stephen Noble's e-smith-isp contributed RPM. This allows you to dial whenever you want, rather than go 'auto'... Imay be mistaken, but I think Darrell May has another contrib rpm in the boiler that supports a windows dial agent(http://myezserver.com then support/docs/mitel...) but I think he's just gone on holiday, so support is kinda thin :)

Are you using ESSG4.1.2 or SME5?

BTW I found the mru /mtu to be set too high, and therefore traffic was unusually slow, and thus causing diald to think there was a dropout...
I must admit to only every using e-smith in continuous mode and either "service diald stop" or flicking the switch. Yeah, I know... slack...

That should cover a fair whack of the options, and there are a couple more if you want to look at man diald and man pppd...

Regards,

Craig Foster

PS If this is getting too large, do you want to take it off list, until we resolve it, then we can put the fix back to the list... Just an option...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Craig Reynolds [mailto:reynoldscraigr at hotmail.com]
> Sent: Monday, 5 November 2001 7:26 PM
> To: plug at plug.linux.org.au
> Subject: RE: [plug] e-smith anyone?
> 
> 
> actually forget about what I just said, I looked mtu and 
> mru up. I cant see 
> how changing these options would effect the number of times 
> my machine 
> dialed, and I have found that setting the retry-count 
> option does not work, 
> possible because the server is set to be connected all the 
> time, and this 
> overides the setting.
> 
> ©raig ®eynolds
> "Just Because this is never going to work is no reason to 
> be negative!"

<snip>


> >>From: "Craig Foster" <fostware at iinet.net.au>
> >>Reply-To: plug at plug.linux.org.au
> >>To: <plug at plug.linux.org.au>
> >>Subject: RE: [plug] e-smith anyone?
> >>Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2001 18:10:07 +0800
> >>
> >>Actually, in /etc/e-smith/templates/etc/diald.conf/redial-timeout
> >>"redial-timeout 600"
> >>and /etc/e-smith/templates/etc/diald.conf/retry-count
> >>"retry-count 3"
> >>
> >>I'd also recreate the fragments mtumru with
> >>"mtu 576"
> >>"mru 576"
> >>  as the defaults are for cable / xDSL
> >>
> >>According to "the e-smith way" they talk about, anyway...
> >>Should work on SME5 and ESSG41x
> >>
> >>Regards,
> >>
> >>Craig Foster
> >>
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