[plug] if anybody's wondering why bits of perth just fell off the 'net...

[Craig Ringer]

> Have you got the backup connection automated, and if so,
> is your script/whatever in a shape you'd be prepared to pass on to
> others?

Nope ; in fact I never really had a back-up system 'till a few months 
ago when it became clear that the ADSL network could no longer be relied 
upon. The backup consists of the 56k that was our pre-ADSL connection 
method, and kppp ;-)

I really should look at automating something based on watching the 
interface stats or maybe tcpdump (failure is lots of ARP requests going 
out, and that's it) but I'm not really prepared to do so at this point. 
I'm present at all times where loss of access is a danger, and automated 
failover has its own risks (like the fact that if it goes over when not 
needed, we lose 4/5 of our bandwidth which we NEED). The key point is 
that at present I don't have a way of detecting link _recovery_ after 
failure, 'cos iiNet assigns us the same IP for dial-up and ADSL, 
preventing me from having the ADSL interface up at the same time.

I suppose I could, say
ping -I eth1 203.0.178.191
(ping using eth1, the ADSL interface, to iiNet's DNS) and see if replies 
come in via 56k but I don't know if that'd work and its ugly.

So for now, its manual fail-over for me.

-- 
Craig Ringer
GPG Key Fingerprint: AF1C ABFE 7E64 E9C8 FC27  C16E D3CE CDC0 0E93 380D
	-- if it ain't broke, add features 'till it is. (or:)
	while (! broken) { features ++ ; broken = isBroken(features) }