[SWLUG] Pings are looking up

[Gareth Bowker]

On Sun, 2003-04-20 at 15:41, Rhys Sage wrote:

> >There is a large number of ways of doing this, possibly the most
> >convenient would be to setup auto dialling, such that the machine with
> >the modem would dial up the internet whenever any of the computers on
> >your network tried to access an IP address that is not on your LAN (and
> >thus would be on the internet)
> 
> Ah. Now that would be useful but not secure. I'd rather have to call a
> dialling program and tell it to dial my ISP. That way, I'd know exactly when
> i'd be online and should also be able to tell it to get offline. With
> Windows, I can do this fairly easily using the RAS library. In fact, on my
> website there's sample code that uses RASEnumConnections and the code allows
> people to force an internal modem to hang up. I'm not sure how I'd achieve
> the same under Linux (not that I have Kylix anyway).

You might want to read some of the HOWTOs on this subject. There are
quite a few covering different aspects of dialup on the LDP site,
http://www.tldp.org/ , specifically the Modem-HOWTO. Also, take a look
at the diald howto and the man pages for pppd. diald's pretty good,
because you can lock down what's allowed to connect you to the internet
(e.g. only dial when I try to connect to port 80 on random.external.host
from my.internal.machine) - it should give you the control you're after.
As for bringing the connection up/down from a windows machine, no idea,
but you can't be the first person to have wanted to do this. A good
resource for finding software like this is http://freshmeat.net/ or (if
the search has improved since last time I used it) http://sf.net/

Gareth
-- 
| Gareth Bowker           | <bowkerg at teccon.co.uk> |
| Software Engineer       | http://www.thetcl.com/ |
| Technology Concepts Ltd | +44 870 870 5088       |