rpp-dial: Reasonable Person Principle Dialer

rpp-dial will help you make reasonable use of the CMU SCS dialup pools for SLIP or PPP connections. It monitors the status of the pools and will switch pools or disconnect if they get crowded and your machine is idle.

Requirements

rpp-dial has been tested under Linux; I believe it will work under NetBSD and probably other Unix variants. (Let me know if you try it on other platforms with or without success.)

It requires

Installation and Configuration

To install rpp-dial:

  1. Make sure you have `wish' and `perl'.
  2. Download the rpp-dial program (current version is 0.20).
  3. Do
            chmod +x rpp-dial
    
  4. Install rpp-dial somewhere (perhaps /usr/local/sbin/rpp-dial).
  5. Download the sample config file, edit it as appropriate, and save it in /etc/rpp-dial.config or /usr/local/etc/rpp-dial.config. (You may save it elsewhere if you prefer, but you'll need to give the location on the command line with the -config flag.)
Now you're ready to run rpp-dial. You can start it up after dialing in or use it to dial in. Run it as
        /usr/local/sbin/rpp-dial -debug
at first, to make it easier to see what's happening. Please let me know if you have any problems or suggestions.

Auxiliary Tools

Sample dip dialup scripts.
(not yet available)
Bennet Yee's xidle program
You will probably want to run this to keep your idle time set properly under X.
iScreen (aka `screen')
Running iScreen (available as /usr/local/bin/screen on most CS platforms) will help you deal better with disconnections, since you can reattach to a running screen session after reconnecting. (It's better than the detaching telnetd.)
Check the status of the CS modem pools.

Darrell Kindred
Last modified: Tue Aug 24 09:39:15 EDT 1999