On Mon, 24 Jan 2000, Chris Thomson wrote:
> That's right, bear in mind, I share a flat with 8 people 6 with
> computers, all on a network. To try to cut down on phone useage
> we use diald, however, it's most useful if we all connect at the
> same time, ie we can do mudane non time critical stuff at the
> same time, e.g. checking mail.
Two suggestions:
1) run fetchmail for everyone in ip-up, then they can contact
the local linux server to get their mail instead of contacting the
remote server. This has security implications, though: the server
administrator may have access to all users' e-mail passwords and
stored e-mail. You must consider whether that is a potential
problem or not.
2) Have the windows clients try to connect to the mail servers
regularly (every 10 minutes, or even every minute, although that
starts to suck up bandwidth) in the background. Set up your
diald.filter so that POP requests (or IMAP or whatever people use
to check e-mail) don't bring up the link. When the link is up,
the queries are passed on as normal, and people are notified of
new mail as soon as their machines check for it. When the link is
down, the queries don't leave the local net and the link isn't
brought up for them.
Simple, clean, elegant ... the only (minor) irritation I see is
that forcing a (real, useful) check for mail would be a two step
process: bringing the link up with dctrl or whatever, and then
asking the mail reader to check for mail. There may be one-step
ways to do this depending on the mail reader. It becomes less of
an issue the more often the mail readers check for new mail.
Ed
--
Ed Doolittle <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"Everything we do, we do for a reason." -- Peter O'Chiese
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