1. Introduction

Contents of this section

1.1 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.

1.2 Where can I find out more?

The diald home page at http://www.loonie.net/~eschenk/diald.html provides access to the most up to date information about diald at all times. If you don't have access to the web, you can also just obtain the diald distribution, which includes the documentation for diald.

Note that the address of the diald home page has recently changed!

1.3 Where can I get diald?

The most recent release of diald is version 0.16. Diald is available from sunsite and the numerous sunsite mirrors. The URL of diald at sunsite is ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/Network/serial/diald-0.16.tar.gz. The latest version of diald can also be obtained from the diald home page at http://www.loonie.net/~eschenk/diald.html.

1.4 Where can I get the Linux Diald FAQ?

An ASCII version of the FAQ is distributed with the source code for diald, although the FAQ may be updated more often than the source. The latest version of this document is always available in a number of formats from the diald home page at http://www.loonie.net/~eschenk/diald.html.

1.5 The linux-diald mailing list.

There is a mailing list for the discussion of diald. You may subscribe by sending a mail message with ``subscribe linux-diald'' in the body to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu. If you have successfully subscribed you should get an acknowledgement. For help on the use of the mail server send a message with ``help'' in the body to the same address.

The mailing list is being archived by Jeremy Hall jhall@isdn.net. Copies of the archive can be obtained at ftp://rex.isdn.net/pub/diald. Currently the archives are updated once a month.

1.6 Reporting bugs in diald.

Please send bug reports, patches or suggestions for improvements to the author (Eric Schenk eschenk@rogers.wave.ca ).

1.7 Contributing the the FAQ.

Contributions for the FAQ, suggestions for improvements, and comments in general should be sent to the primary author (Eric Schenk eschenk@rogers.wave.ca ).

1.8 Authorship and Copyright.

This FAQ was written by Eric Schenk and Gordon Soukoreff.

Copyright 1994-1997 Eric Schenk. Copyright 1994, 1995, The TradeNET Corporation.


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