Topic: Dial-up persistant connection

[iy houng]

WE setup an e-smith 4.1.2 on a Pentium system, hoping to serve as an occasional Web page server, with dial-up to Bell's advantage internet. The dial-up was set as continous connected all the time. But the line drops often. Our question is;

       1: Why the e-smith server did not dial out after the line dropped, or is there way to program it so it would automatically dial out, or are there ways to prevent the line drop ?

       2: We setup the Dynamic DNS with dyndns.org, select dyndns.org services during installation. But then everytime after the dial-up line dropped the Web pages disappeared. We wonder how the e-smith handles the DNS update, did it automatically contact dyndns.org to update the IP number after re-connect ?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Graeme Robinson]

re: 1.  I presume you've set the connection to be continuous in the console config?

re: 2. It is triggered (ie the update) everytime a new external IP is allocated.  The script can be viewed in /sbin/e-smith/dynamic-dns/ eg /sbin/e-smith/dynamic-dns/dyndns.org for dyndns.org, so you can manually force an update by running that. (be aware that forcing updates for an IP already in the database is regarded as abuse and dyndns.org will suspend your account if it happens frequently)

You should have a look at your log /var/log/messages to see what's happening with the update - error output should appear there.  Maybe do a grep dyndns.org /var/log/messages to locate the entries quickly.

First thing I'd be doing would be checking the correct login/pw combination by performing  manual update on the dyndns.org pages and then re-entering them into the console to see if that fixes it.

[iy houng]

Graeme, thank you for your quick help. The continuously connection was set in the console configuration. Selecting "Continous" on all hours; office, night and week-end. The dyndns.org was also selected during console configuration. The login/pw was manually tested on the browser, and it worked.

I will do some more tests tomorrow, following your suggestion. Thank you again for your help. And good night.

[iy houng]

Graeme,

We followed your suggestions, look at the file /var/log/messages;

     "houng is not a Fully-Qualified Domain Name"

Change the host name to "Houng.com", same message;

     "houng.com is not a Fully-Qualified Domain Name"

Change again to www.houng.com, same error message.

What exactly is a Fully-Qualified domain name ?

We tried many different names, some registered with NIC, mostly not, same errors. The auto dial-out is working, but dynamic DNS IP is not updated.

Any suggestions ?

[iy houng]

Graeme,

Thanks for your pointer. The e-smith server works now, the way it supposed to be. Searching through the bulletins we figure the hostname need to be xxxx.dyndns.org on the server. After name change the service dial out and update the IP timely.

[Graeme Robinson]

iy,
That's interesting - you mean you entered your dyndns.org host name
xxx.dyndns.org
in the console server configuration value "primary domain name" ?

[Dan Brown]

Graeme,

That's what _should_ be entered as "primary domain name", as that's all that dyndns.org knows how to handle.

[Graeme Robinson]

I had the same problem but hadn't gotten around to resolving it, performing the updates manually - I've now got it working thanks to iy and added my real domain to my virtual domains so that I can continue to receive mail.