On 05/20/05 6:58 PM, J. Graue wrote:

> The users will turn on the firewall/gateway, say, in the morning, leave it
> on all day, use their Windows® systems, occasionally visiting the Internet.
> I'm not sure if the phone line for data will be exclusively used for that;
> it may also be needed for faxes. Of course, I know that while on the
> Internet, the office will not be able to receive faxes. But, it means that
> I can't just hog the line... I need to let it go after, say, 10 minutes of
> idleness.

I did something similar before I had DSL; see the manual for ppp
(especially the section titled DIAL ON DEMAND) and
/etc/ppp/ppp.conf.sample for the details, but

set timeout 600

(assuming 10 minutes -- 600 seconds) and running it as

ppp -auto [system]

will do the trick. The userspace ppp software will always be running,
but will only dial the ISP when an outgoing packet is detected. It will
shutdown after 10 minutes of inactivity.

> I'd like to figure out how to allow someone on the network the ability to
> shutdown the firewall/gateway without having to login to the system (I'm
> worried they'll freak out at having to look at a command-line), but that can
> wait, unless someone has a suggestion.

The system I was using was on all the time, but someone else in this
thread suggested using a CGI script. A cron job could shut it down, but
might cause a problem for someone working overtime...

--
Chris Odorjan - bobnet@canada.com