Configuring Blip

There will be a number of thing that you will either have to tweek in this code depending on what you're connecting to. Listed below are the things you should need to change. I've connected to three modem pools, and each one of them required different parameters.

Variables

force="no"
The Force variable is set when you want to kill it dead, no questions asked.

mach="lucky"
The mach variable is the machine name (from /etc/uucp/Systems entry) that you want to connect to.

domain="acns|ais"
Every connection will have something distinctive in the netstat output, for instance when I connect to acns.nwu.edu, netstat will always show acns as part of the connections I make. Set this to something reliable.

success_string="Your IP address"
Set the success_string variable to something(s) that you get when the connection get's made correctly, and it can continue processing.

failure_string="NO CARRIER"
Set the failure_stringvariable to something(s) that you get when the connection didn't work, for example busy signals, incorrect password verification, etc...

default_route="129.105.9.0"
Set this to the route you should use. For instance, when I connect to 129.105.9.XXX, I always have to route via 129.105.9.0 anyway. Go fig.

netmask="255.255.255.0"
Set this to the appropriate netmask.

blip_blurb="/usr/local/lib/blip.blurb"
Set this to wherever you want the little blip blurb.

Reasons for this file:

  1. Xconfirm can only take 10 command line elements.
  2. Because of the font I like, the spacing is funky.

Inside the Connect Function

/usr/etc/slip -dd -cp cslip -m $netmask -u $mach &
Remove the -c if you don't want it to redial if it loses the connection.
Change cslip if you want something other than Van Jacobson Compression.

node=`egrep "Your IP address" /tmp/slip.out  | awk -F.  '{ print $5 }'`
/usr/etc/ifconfig sl0 129.105.9.$node netmask $netmask
When entering slip mode, the modem pool echoes "Your IP address is 129.105.9.XXX" so I grep this last number (the only one that isn't constant) and use this in the ifconfig'ing. If your server has a wider range of IP addresses, you will have to modify these two lines further.

remove=`netstat -r | grep default | awk '{print $1  "  " $2}'`
/usr/etc/route delete $remove

/usr/etc/route add net default $default_route 1
These three lines aren't necessary if you only connect to the same place, but occasionally I do connect elsewhere, and this insures that the route is made each time.

This is a good place to include anything additional that you want run at connection time.