Re: Dial-on-demand SLIP/PPP daemon

[roemer@informatik.uni-frankfurt.de]

> I have recently been doing some spare time work on on a daemon to support
> dail on demand for both SLIP and PPP links under linux. The daemon
> may also work on other platforms, but I can't give and guarrentee's.
> My work has now reached a stage where I am ready to do some alpha testing.
> If you are interested in testing this code you can find it at:
> 
> sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/Incoming/diald-0.1.tar.gz
> 
> Eventually it should move to:
> 
> sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/system/Network/serial/diald-0.1.tar.gz
> 
> Sorry, there are no precompiled binaries in this distribution.
> 
> There are some known problems with this release:
> 
> * It won't support SLIP links with dynamic IP assignment.
> * When using a PPP link if it goes down and comes back up
>   (the deamon will force a restablish) your existing TCP
>   connections may be frozen. This seems to be a problem in the
>   kernel routing code.
> * The daemon can go into a loop attempting to restablish
>   a connection forever if your modem gets wedge. The daemon
>   should really time out.
> * The daemon attempts to do a fast link take down when there
>   are no TCP connections (6 seconds idle time by
>   default). This has two problems:
>   - the daemon only knows how to count the total number of TCP
>     connections on your system, so if you have a local net the
>     number of connections may never go to 0.
>   - services that use connectionless protocols, such as Mosaic,
>     may cause the link to spend a lot of time going up and coming down.
> 
> Suggested fixes to any of these problems are welcome!

I had a look at this. It might indeed work with MintNet in principle,
but sources are "hacked up for linux" (tm), so porting it would involve
rewriting most of the code.


Kay.