I'm always annoyed at README files announcing a new release of a package without informing the reader of the purpose of the package. Therefore, first things first. What is diald? Diald is a daemon that does demand dialing for PPP and SLIP. The purpose of diald is to make it transparently appear that you have a permanent connection to a remote site. Diald sets up a "proxy" device which stands in for the physical connection to a remote site. It then monitors the proxy, waiting for packets to arrive. When interesting packets arrive it will attempt to establish the physical link to the remote site using either SLIP or PPP, and if it succeeds it will forward traffic from the proxy to the physical link. As well, diald will monitor traffic once the physical link is up, and when it has determined that the link is idle, the remote connection is terminated. The criteria for bringing the link up and taking it down are configurable at run time, and are based upon the type of traffic passing over the link. This is the sixth ALPHA release of this code. This is a bug fix release only. There are no new features in this release. As I said before, this is still ALPHA code, your mileage may vary! I'm using diald daily, and it works for me, but I can't anticipate every software/hardware configuration out there. For reference, I wrote and tested diald on a system running bleeding edge Linux 1.1.*. Currently I'm up to Linux 1.1.76. I've tested diald using both pppd-2.1.2b and pppd-940914 and it should work with either. I've had reports that people cannot get it to work with 1.0.x series kernels. If anyone does get it working with 1.0.x series kernels I'd be interested to hear about it. WHERE TO GET IT --------------- The file is called diald-0.6.tar.gz. I've uploaded it to sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/Incoming. It should move to sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/system/Network/serial after a suitable interval. MAILING LIST ------------ David S. Miller is providing a mailing for the discussion of diald on his Majordomo server at vger.rutgers.edu. Send mail containing the line "subscribe linux-diald" in the BODY of the message to Majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu to join the list. Send mail with the word "help" in the body to get help on the correct use of the Majordomo list server. Announcements of new releases are made on the mailing list, and its a good place to ask questions of users who already have diald up and running. I would prefer the mailing list to be my primary channel of communication with users. This gives you the added benifit of asking your questions of everyone on the list, many of whom may have the same question, or some of who may have already solved your problem. This miminizes the time I have to spend answering questions about diald, and gives me more time to spend improving the program. FAQ --- There is a very sketchy FAQ distributed with this release. This is only the initial release of the FAQ. Gordon Soukoreff has kindly volunteered to maintain the FAQ for diald. If you have trouble getting started with diald, and you don't find your answer in the existing FAQ, please consider contributing to the FAQ once you get your questions answered. You can send contributions to Gordon at diald_faq@tradenet.com. (Please don't send them directly to Gordon he's using a semi automated process and we don't want to mess it up.) BEFORE INSTALLATION ------------------- You must have SLIP devices in your kernel in order to use diald, EVEN IF YOU PLAN TO USE ONLY PPP CONNECTIONS! Let me repeat that, diald needs SLIP to work under all circumstances. It uses a SLIP link on a pseudo terminal to create the proxy device that stands in for the real connection. Naturally, if you plan on using diald to establish PPP connections, you must also have PPP devices in your kernel. You must also have a program like "chat" to do dialing. Also, if you plan to have a lot of diald's running around (connecting to different sites) you will probably need to increase the number of SLIP and possibly PPP devices in your kernel. Note that diald takes up one SLIP device for every connection whether it is active or not, and one PPP device for every connection that is currently active. CONFIGURING DIALD ----------------- Various pathnames that diald needs to know can be configured in "config.h". Edit this file appropriately. The eventual installation location for the diald binary, the man page and the diald definitions file can be configured in the Makefile. BASIC INSTALLATION (FIRST TIME USERS) ------------------------------------- WARNING: Don't do this if you are already running a previous version of diald, it will destroy your existing configuration files! First run "make depend" then "make" and then "make install" as root. This makes the diald daemon and installs it. Next run "make install-configs". This will install the the configuration files /etc/diald.defs and /etc/diald.conf. After installation you probably want to edit /etc/diald.conf to customize diald to your local site. Read the manual page to find out what this file can contain. INSTALLATION IF YOU ARE ALREADY USING AN EARLIER VERSION -------------------------------------------------------- Run "make depend" then "make" and then "make install" as root to install the new executable and man page. If you don't want to save an existing /etc/diald.conf file just proceed as for the basic first time installation. Otherwise, you must copy the doc/diald.defs file to /etc/diald.defs by hand. This file contains the definitions of protocol rules and variable names used by the filter definitions. YOU MUST HAVE IT INSTALLED. If you are using a version of diald older than 0.4 you will also need to edit your existing /etc/diald.conf file because the names of some of the diald options have changed. See the CHANGES file for more information. USING DIALD ----------- Read the man page for more information. BUGS & LIMITATIONS ------------------ There are some known problems and limitations. Lines in options files can contain at most 1024 charac- ters. Longer lines are silently truncated. If there are no filter rules specified then no packets will be matched and the daemon won't do anything. It should probably match all packets by default in this case. When closing the modem diald often generates the error message "failed to restore initial modem terminal set- tings: I/O error". I do not yet known why this error hap- pens, but it does not seem to inhibit the operation of diald. Diald's support for multiple modem devices is somewhat limited. It will try a list of devices, but it uses the same chat script and control settings on all the devices. This means that you must have the same kind of modem on every device. At some point diald needs a better way to configure individual devices for call out in an independent way. Please send bug reports, patches or suggestions for improvements to me, preferably via the mailing list. Eric Schenk schenk@cs.toronto.edu Toronto, Canada, January 4th, 1995.