Well, this has been quite the day … sometime around "zero dark thirty" I finally had my bash script written and debugged. The $30 I spent on the book was Well Worth It.
Inside of a do-forever loop (which has a sleep for one minute), it will ping a close site, then grep the result to check for failure. If the packet fails, the "Hiccup!" message is appended to the error_log file, and a counter is incremented. (It turns out that a single ping packet will occasionally fail.) If it succeeds, the counter is reset to zero, and it goes back to sleep.
If the counter fails three times in a row, it's safe to assume that the connection has been lost, so it kills the pppd, redials and starts a new pppd, then kills and restarts httpd. 'Nuff Said!
Well, I'd tested it as well as I could by simply turning off the modem, so I got onto Bast to ask the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group (GNHLUG) if there was a Better Way to do it, because I thought it was Coyote Ugly.
While composing my plea for help and answering some e-mail message, I heard Brucilla dialing the modem in the other room. Since I had a Netscape session running in the background with one of my waterholes pages on Brucilla, I did a "reload" after I'd finished my text editing. Sure enough, I was reconnected as if nothing had happened. The sucker actually worked, so I went to bed a little later feeling Quite Pleased with myself.
Around 09:00, I woke up and hear Brucilla dialing the modem, and smiled. Then I heard it dialing again. And again! So, I got up to see what the problem was … the modem at the other end wasn't answering!! I called Tech Support, got transferred to a voicebot (neither of the dedicated line people were there yet) and left a message.
This led me to doing some cleanup of the bash script, after which I zapped the error_log file so I could track from a clean slate, turned down the volume on the modem, restarted the script, and went back to sleep.
Around 11:00, I woke up, saw that it was still not answering, and called Tech Support again … someone was in, but I still got a voicebot, which started the same way as the first one had, even though it was someone else's: "If your dedicated line has dropped, call the receptionist and have them locate a carbon-based lifeform ASAP."
When I woke up again at 13:00 and it was still not answering, I called a third time, and "patiently" explained that the connection was my SOLE SOURCE OF INCOME, and that both unanswered messages had told me, in slightly different language, that she was to FIND A BODY TO TAKE MY CALL, because someone was going to have to go to the Lowell POP site and reset the modem there!1
She put me on hold for a few minutes, then came back to say that she couldn't find any one, but that she'd take a message, which I assumed she would put on a Post-It note on someone's monitor.
This time I stayed up, and checked my e-mail using Bast. There were three replies (!) to my query about a Better Way … two of them suggested that I use diald (which I had never heard of in any of the HOWTOs, and was not included with Slackware Linux), and one person asking for a copy of my script. :-)
I sent all three of them a "thnx", my intention to use WebCrawler to find a copy of diald, and my current tale of woe and-slash-or misery. When I wandered back into the living room, I noticed that Brucilla appeared to have successfully reconnected, so I fired up Netscape on Bast, and sure enough, www.waterholes.com was back on the air, and the logs showed that the connection had started about 20 minutes after my last call.
Well, I never sent the guy a copy of the script, but when I talked to Brian about it, he asked me for a copy of diald when I got it up & running, and I told him that what I'd send him was the URL of the FTP site so he could grab it directly. His response was, "Well, if you're going to be that way about it, then I'll expect you to put it on a Web page as one of your DayBook entries!"
So, here I am at my Favorite Local Waterhole, recording the events of the day for posterity, and this entry will be on the 'Net before midnight.
That is all I have to say. -=DAH=- 20-Mar-96
Last update: 21-Mar-96 by dennette@wiz-worx.com <Who is this "Dennette" person?>