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Overactive diald

From PCTech1018 on Wed, 10 Mar 1999

Hello Jim,
I have been following Linux Gazette and your Answer Guy column for about 6 months now. You do a good job as far as I need (other people may need more than I do).

Situation: I have a Linux PC (RedHat 5.2) running as a dial-on-demand Internet Gateway using diald. It works great. I have Samba up and running as well as named. I can connect to the internet from both my Linux PC and Windows95 boxes. When the connection is down, and I attempt to connect with ftp, ping, http or whatever, diald correctly establishes the internet connection to my ISP.

Everything is hunky-dory except one annoyance: diald dials every hour whether or not someone is attempting an internet connection. How do I get this to stop?

Thanks, Darren

You almost certainly have a cron script that is doing this. Look at your /etc/crontab file to see what's running at that time. Some fairly subtle things can involve DNS/MX or other Internet services which are dynamically bringing up your connection.

'diald' has features to filter out some sorts of traffic from its consideration as "activity" for the line. Thus it can be configured to ignore some sorts of packets.

Read the diald man pages for more details on that.

[ The University of Oregon hosts a site which points at lots of documentation for Linux. At https://limestone.uoregon.edu/woven/linux-doc-other.html#LMP you should be able to find a website near you carrying manpages, if there aren't adequate ones on your installation. -- Heather ]

Copyright © 1999, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 39 April 1999

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