Hi,

I have my laptop which I use in several places, but when I am at work I use it along my desktop pc. I am using Synergy to be able to use them both with the same keyboard and mouse.

The following three questions are more or less equivalent, because if I can solve some of these questions then I think I can achieve what I want.

• Is there a way to start synergy (or an arbitrary script) automatically with certain parameters every time I connect to this network, but not on other networks?
• Is there a way to detect from a script if the computer is on a given network.
• Is there a way to detect if a given host (fixed ip address) is up and with a given service (tcp port) open?

Thanks in advance

Well I'm not really familiar with synergy so I can't really speak to your first question, however I do believe your next two questions can be accomplished. For finding if a computer is on a specific network, couldn't you simply write a script to grep the output of ifconfig and return a value if the network number you were looking for was found?

As for finding whether a port is open on a box, you will most likely be using telnet for that, and you could write a script to attempt to open a telnet session on whatever ports you are looking for. This seems to be the common practice for finding open ports.

Thanks for the ideas! I'll try first the approach of grepping the output of "ifconfig eth1" and look for clues in the interface configuration numbers. The second idea you mention around telnet is good too. I guess I will solve this now either way. Thanks again! I'll keep you posted here on my progress.

I wrote a script a while back which did something similar, and I thought I would post a link to the thread in case it might help you.