Subj : BinkD and MBSE BBS
To   : Peter Knapper
From : Russell Tiedt
Date : Sat Jun 11 2005 07:57 pm

Hello Peter.

11 Jun 05 11:04, you wrote to me:

 RT>> The quality of my internet connection, leaves a great
 RT>> deal to be desired on occasion. For the last 2 days, I
 RT>> have been unable to connect to the 2 systems
 RT>> I poll in Europe, my guess is DNS is temporally right
 RT>> royally screwed, last week, I could not poll Bob Seaborn
 RT>> or Janice Kracht in the USA for a 24 hour period.

 PK> Just a query, do you run any sort of cacheing DNS at your end?

Yes the IP-Cop system which does duty as Internet gateway/firewall and DHCP 
server, does DNS caching

 PK> I run a copy of BIND on my Home LAN as both a cacheing DNS and also as
 PK> a local DNS. This seems to smooth out a lot of the variables for
 PK> outbound calls, and removes the reliance on exteral DNS to some
 PK> extent. Of course if the issue you are seeing is not specific to DNS
 PK> lookups then it may not help at all, but it may be worth
 PK> investigating...

My feeling is that the problems are DNS related, and I suspect that DNS 
updates lag somewhere along the route.

 RT>> I start all polls here manually because I have yet to
 RT>> figure out how to stop
 RT>> and start my internet connection which is handled by my IP-COP
 RT>> firewall/internet server/gateway box from a script on
 RT>> my BBS system, over the network. :-((

 PK> Ahaaaa, so I take it you are using a Dial-up connection? yes, that can
 PK> be fun.......;-)

Yes, and it can be fun ... :-((

 PK> A long time ago when I used dialup-IP I had a master script (using
 PK> OS/2 REXX but I am sure it can be replicated under any *nx system)
 PK> that monitored the Dial-up activity. A CRON job fired off the regular
 PK> Dial-up events (such as an IP POLL) and it signalled the REXX script

Yes, that can be done, just that I don't now what is required to do so for 
IP-Cop which I use for my Internet server/gateway/firewall

Must remember to do a search for this on the internet some time.

 PK> About 6 months before ADSL arrived here I swapped to using a "Freesco"
 PK> (a VERY customised single floppy boot Linux build) box to control the

Yeah, I know what Freesco does, IP-Cop is similar, but uses a current 2.4.* 
kernel, and implements iptables and not ipchains, and uses a heap more hdd 
space than Freesco, but then it does a lot more as well.

Russell

--- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5
 * Origin: Rusty's BBS - Bloemfontein, Free State, South Africa (5:7105/1)

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