Dial-Demandd

I made this set of scripts when I installed an Internet gateway: In my private little network, more than one computer can connect to the Internet through the use of one single gateway. The pain was just on how to get the dialup-link to my ISP up and down correctly. There are quite big packages out there dialling when traffic is required. But I didn't like this option as:

• It is a bit pain to install correctly.
• Seems to dial whenever IT wants to, not when YOU want it to.

Out of this frustration, dial-demandd evolved. It is a set of tools, script snipplets and small GUI apps for both GTK and MS Windows which feature:

• Users on the network can initiate & terminate links from any client running virtually any OS (tested for various Unixes and Windows).
• Simple access-control on who can control the status of the link.
• The link can be brought up and down through a script itself (cron can initiate & terminate the link at given times).
• The link can be terminated on "less than xx bytes traffic for yy seconds". This is perfect in a situation where cron fires up the link and starts something to e.g. fetch your mail. After the traffic dropped (all the mail is here), the link is brought down automatically.
• Publishes your IP address to a web-page. This is great for all you cable-modem & ADSL users out there being charged a flat rate. If you have some server (HTTP, FTP, ...) running on your host, you can now publish your IP to your homepage so that people know how to reach you -- even after a thunderstorm rebooting your box.
• Maintains rudimentary log-files showing you when your box was online for how long and how much the cost was.
• Contains a graphical front-end for GTK to control & visualize the link status.

This package is actually a set of tools and scripts which I initially developed and enhanced for my personal use. This basically means that there is not much documentation available now -- and I fear that this won't change much except somebody else takes over the project or transfers substantial amounts of money to my bank account (which is available on request ;-). The reason simply being that by now I have flat-rate internet access and DynDNS, so I don't need to control my link any longer...
Anyway, included in the package is a short pdf-documentation which I once wrote for myself -- just not to forget how to configure it in case something fails. If you think that this is the ultimate tool for you but you can't get it up-and-running, mail me as much logging as possible and I will try to help. At the end, it served me for more than 2 years very reliably.

Get the gzipped tarball. Unpack it and read the INSTALL and PDF file for some details...