On Sat, 28 Dec 2002, John F. Woods wrote:

> 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?

I implemented something like this as a shell script that was called as a cgi
from a web server. I don't have the scripts now, it was ages ago. But i
would recomend saving your self the pain of trying to write your own client,
server, and a protocol for them both. Most people have web browsers nowadays
:).

(btw - if you where going to go the snmp route ucd-snmp can call a shall
script whenever a particular oid is called so it's pretty easy to get info
out of your machine that way).

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