Before I go off and implement this, I an wondering if anyone else has already
done something like this:

I have a small network at home with my NetBSD box acting as the PPP link to
the outside world.  When client computers have problems reaching the Internet,
I would like to have a little application on the clients (all Macs) which would
be able to poll the NetBSD box to find out the status of pppd (link up, link
questionable (i.e. failed an echo request), link down, etc).  I have pppd set
to be persistent, so the server side can't just check to see if pppd is 
running; and I'd like to be able to detect the "link questionable" state,
so checking the results of "ifconfig ppp0" isn't really enough.

So, my plan is to modify pppd to record current status of the connection in
a file, which can be checked by some tiny server application.  Has anyone
implemented anything like this, and/or does anyone else find it potentially
useful?

Thanks,
John Woods
jfw@funhouse.com