Topic: Help!! dialup attempts

[Phil Routley]

Hello,

I have asked this question a couple of times, but nobody seems to interested in helping me. It involves modem dial up attempts.

I personally had a problem a couple of months ago, with this, I have a permanent 56K modem conection with a static IP address. For no fault of mine the modem link at the other end died.

The e-smith server continued to dial up and tried to connect approx 2500 times, over a period of a couple of days, and as nobody was home, I was lumbered with a large bill, not to mention the arguments with ISPs and telecomunication companys. As I had to negotiate big time. ((and ofcourse it is never anyones problem)).

Please don't get me wrong, I think the e-smith product is great, and all credit to all the people who work so hard on the project, but how can we ensure that this problem does not happen, again as it has the potential to be very costly.

Phil R

[A.Scott Pringle]

I was also stuck with a large bill when i tried out 4.1.1 in continuous connection mode via dialup.
I had some 362 connects over the month in question.
Usually I have about 100 connects.
It would be good to have some sort of check of how many times a connection has been attempted and have it stop after a certain number/time.

[Phil Routley]

Hi Scott,

I hope we can both get some help, with this, as my problem is obviously not uncommon.

Phil

[Phil Routley]

Phil Routley wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I have asked this question a couple of times, but nobody
> seems to interested in helping me. It involves modem dial up
> attempts.
>
> I personally had a problem a couple of months ago, with this,
> I have a permanent 56K modem conection with a static IP
> address. For no fault of mine the modem link at the other end
> died.
>
> The e-smith server continued to dial up and tried to connect
> approx 2500 times, over a period of a couple of days, and as
> nobody was home, I was lumbered with a large bill, not to
> mention the arguments with ISPs and telecomunication
> companys. As I had to negotiate big time. ((and ofcourse it
> is never anyones problem)).
>
> Please don't get me wrong, I think the e-smith product is
> great, and all credit to all the people who work so hard on
> the project, but how can we ensure that this problem does not
> happen, again as it has the potential to be very costly.
>
> Phil R


I know this is prob a boring question, but could somebody give some input to this problem.

[Kees Blokland]

My 2 cents:

have a look in /etc/e-smith/templates/etc/diald.conf

you find that a lot of options that control the dialling behavior, that can be set there.

retry-count would be an obvious choice
or: redial-timeout
or :connect timeout

enter some sensible values, disconnect the line and watch your /var/messages file to see what it tries to do and how often. That should at least give you the ability to restrict the amount of dial-outs..

hope this helps you a bit..

kees

[Phil Routley]

Kees Blokland wrote:
>
> My 2 cents:
>
> have a look in /etc/e-smith/templates/etc/diald.conf
>
> you find that a lot of options that control the dialling
> behavior, that can be set there.
>
> retry-count would be an obvious choice
> or: redial-timeout
> or :connect timeout
>
> enter some sensible values, disconnect the line and watch
> your /var/messages file to see what it tries to do and how
> often. That should at least give you the ability to restrict
> the amount of dial-outs..
>
> hope this helps you a bit..


Thanks for the input,

I guess my main concern, is what happens if the e-smith box can not authenticate with remote properly, and then hangs up and retries, as the phone call has been put through, does your reference to diald.conf include this problem.

Phil R

[Alejandro]

Diald  has many options to control the dialup connection, including modem init string an aditional configuration options, I'm sure you can find usefull tips on it in diald man pages and of course in your modem documentation.

you should follow Kees's advice about reading var/log/messages it always shows the reason of all problems, is a very large file, even more on saturdays,(it rotates each week) so you can make some "greps" to find diald messages that will give you a more accurate aproximation about the problem, and in the man pages you will sure find the way to resolve it.

Alejandro

[Kees Blokland]

(Still playing with my E-Smith_ISDN link:)

Looking at man pppd I found another usefull  variable:

maxfail=

This sets the maximum number of times a broken connection is retried.
This would indeed be a good thing to incorporate by default..

( when I get my isdn stuff going, I'll add this as well)
(if nothing else, it saves miles of logs, complaining about not getting a connection..)

kees

[Phil Routley]

Kees Blokland wrote:
>
> (Still playing with my E-Smith_ISDN link:)
>
> Looking at man pppd I found another usefull  variable:
>
> maxfail=
>
> This sets the maximum number of times a broken connection is
> retried.
> This would indeed be a good thing to incorporate by default..
>
> ( when I get my isdn stuff going, I'll add this as well)
> (if nothing else, it saves miles of logs, complaining about
> not getting a connection..)
>
> kees

Hi,

This looks great, and would probaly , fix my problem, could you give me some idea on how ai would apply this variable to my e-smith box, do I just include in in the /etc/ppp/options file ? or pppoptions file? or in the e-smith templates?

Phil