Richard Rauch <rkr@olib.org> writes:

>  in the URL, which breaks the link.  For future reference, could you please
>  try to put a space *immediately* after any URL you give?  I know that I'm

No problem, I try to follow your suggestion.

> Maybe everyone uses ISDN where you are.  I've never seen it first-hand.

Not everyone, even not the majority. But it's not uncommon at all in
``old Europe''[2]. See the answers from Martin Schmitz (TLD .de) and
Mirko Thiesen (from Berlin, see signature) - thanks to both for their
answers!

(BTW: better I look on TLDs and signatures than on names. If not, I
would gess you were also (an ISDN using?) German. ``Richard'' is here
a common first name, and ``Rauch'' a common surname, which does mean
``Smoke'' in English. (My French teacher in school had the same
surname (``Fr. Rauch'', not ``Mrs. Smoke'')))

> (BTW, ISDN appears to be supported in 1.6, contrary to your claim that
> it was added in 1.6.1.  1.6 was a major release.  1.6.1 was a patch-
> release, which was essentially confined to fixing bugs in 1.6.)

Hmm? I wrote ``... before version 1.6 I couldn't ...'' in message
<usn4r2br0sa.fsf@droog.sdf-eu.org> .[1] Maybe a trailing ``I'' (even
with space) will be erroneously transformed to ``.1'' for the
mail-index that your are reading :-)

> Not a direct answer to your query (I hope someone else can answer) but:
> 
> How do you connect/disconnect, now?  Via isdnd (skimming the man-page
> leaves me a little vague)?  Or do you use ifconfig directly on a
> kernel interface?  Can you do these operations with a user-command from
> your normal user-account?

Connecting/disconnecting is not the problem. In NetBSD I do it the
same way like Martin Schmitz (see his recent mail):
ifconfig ippp0 [up,down]

But nevertheless I'm interested in monitoring the ISDN traffic, for I
don't want to disconnect before a download has been completed.
(``xisdnload'' for Linux can both: display and let the user
connect/disconnect; it woud be nice, but wmnet suggested by Martin
Schmitz seems to be sufficient)

> If the answer to the last question is "Yes", then a simple Tcl/Tk
> script of a few lines can do this for you.  (My hazy understanding is
> that you don't want to run Tcl/Tk scripts as root.)

The scripts could call sudo, if configured so.
(BTW: in I4L I don't need to be root to start/stop a ISDN connection.
Let /dev/isdn0 have write access for group dialout, and all I need is
to be a group member.)

> Also, you MIGHT be able to get the ISDN interface to come up on-demand
> and go away after inactivity.  PPP and the in-kernel PPPoE can be done
> that way, at least.  Would this work as well as (or better than) manually
> turning it on & off?

Well, since a few hours I had no idea how to monitor ISDN traffic with
NetBSD. I'm new to NetBSD and fear clandestine traffic, which might
blow up my phone bill (in addition I'm a Suabian - the Suabians are
said to be as economical in Germany as the Scotch are in UK). Even if
ISDN seems comparable to a 56K modem in speed (ISDN has 64KBaud, but
garanteed, in both directions), ISDN is absolutely silent and the
connection is set up in ca. one second.

Regards
  Thomas

[1] see there the space intentionally set after the message id :-)
[2] Mr. Rumsfeld

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