I'm looking to set up a NetBSD box as a router between a SLIP line and
an Ethernet.  The modem on the SLIP line will be connected all the
time, but occasionally the connection drops (telco glitch, somebody
reboots the router at the other end, etc.) and I need to be able to
re-establish the connection without human intervention.

Unfortunately, from what I've seen of the SLIP tools in NetBSD, there
isn't anything to automatically establish the connection, bring it
back up when it drops, etc.  Is there anybody using NetBSD for this
sort of application?  If so, what do you use to maintain the
connection?  All the solutions for setting up SLIP under NetBSD seem
to start with something like, "well first I use cu to connect to my
provider and manually log on, then I suspend the cu process and run
slattach, then...".  That won't work for this application, since it
all has to happen automatically and without intervention.

[The setup that this is replacing is sort of a kludge.  We have an old
286 PC running PC-Route, and plugged into an X-10 power controller
(along with the Hayes Optima 28.8Kbps modem).  There is a cron job
running on our main server machine that tries to ping the router at
the other end of the SLIP link every 5 minutes.  If it doesn't get an
answer, it assumes that the SLIP link has dropped, so it cycles DTR
on the serial port that is connected to the X-10 controller.  This
causes the X-10 controller to cycle power to the PC and the modem.
When the PC comes up, it runs a Telix script from the autoexec.bat
file that connects to the other router, and then runs PC-Route.  So,
don't be afraid to reply if your solution is a bit kludgy -- it just
has to be about as reliable as our current solution, which is to say,
almost 100% uptime.]

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

-Marc Unangst