A couple of PPP related questions

[Dominic Mitchell]

On Mon, May 14, 2001 at 12:52:37PM +0100, Neil Ford wrote:
> On Sun, May 13, 2001 at 11:48:55PM +0100, Paul Civati wrote:
> > Neil Ford <neil at ourshack.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > Is it possible to get PPP to write it's process ID out to a file?
> > 
> > Don't most daemons log to a file in /var/run?
> > 
> This isn't running as a deamon though, I'm using userland PPP.

It depends.  If you're running userland ppp in dial-on-demand mode:

% psg ppp
  PID  TT  STAT      TIME COMMAND
  170  ??  Is     0:00.34 /usr/sbin/ppp -quiet -auto -nat demon
    
Then ppp will log it's pid to /var/run/tun0.pid

> > > Whats the best way to extract the dynamic IP address that's been
> > > allocated to a machine by an ISP. I ideally want the machine to
> > > mail this detail out everytime it makes the connection.  You can
> > > probably guess where I'm going with this one :-)
> > 
> > There are plenty of free dynamic DNS services too.
> >
> I don't really need dynamic DNS, I just want to be notified of the dynamic IP
> that a customer's dial-up box has been assigned in case I need to ssh to it
> in an emergancy to do some support.

As others have suggested, that's probably best done from the ppp.linkup
file.  For example, I run my mail queue from there:

demon:
        !bg /usr/sbin/sendmail -q

All you have to do is add another !bg line, calling your script to
notify you.  Make it a script, don't stuff the command in there, it's
much easier to change later.  For example:

demon:
	!bg /usr/local/bin/notify-neil MYADDR

Note that if you're sending a message via email, you may have to
explicitly request a queue run at the end of the script to actually get
the message sent.

Hmmm, actually, this sort of thing looks like an ideal application for
jabber...

-Dom