On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 1:02 PM, Stephen Irons <[email protected]> wrote: >
> > I am not completely happy at the moment. Apart from my mbox locking concern: > there is no indication whether getmail is busy receiving email, or whether > exim is busy sending email, so you don't know whether it is safe to hang up. > The only solution is to browse the web for a bit longer...or perhaps make a > little Gnome panel applet that monitors the Exim queue (exim -bp), checks > whether getmail is running and turns green when it is safe to hang up... I used to run a program called connectd. connectd was a daemon that dialled into the net when a client told it to, and kept it up while any client required it. You could configure it for any number of clients, anywhere on your lan. The client could be a little taskbar applet that you clicked to make it dialout or hang up (and there was a windows applet as well). It could also be a command line program. To use the command line program you could script something like: connect mailer open # request the link up as user "mailer" postfix flush # process the mail queue run fetchmail # can't remember the exact invocation connect mailer close # release the dialup link put that script in cron every so often (as often as you wanted to process the mail). If the link is already up when cron runs, it stays up until all requesting users (including mailer) release it. If another user requested the net in the middle of a run (say to browse the web), that user's request would keep the link up even when mailer's script had completed. It was a damn good system. Basically the link was up so long as any user requested it, and closed when the last user no longer wanted it. Much better than ppp's native dial on demand in that random broadcast packets (from mr gates' machines) wouldn't trigger a dialout. Unfortunately with the dearth of people actually needing dialup now (compared to, say, 15 years ago) connectd doesn't seem to be developed any more. There was more than one version, both called connect or connectd. The one I didn't use is still on the web here: http://www.methods.co.nz/connect/ - but it doesn't look maintained. The other one was french and seems to have disappeared. You could also try ppp's dial on demand mode.
