Verizon DSL really sucks
 

yeah... this whole weekend it has been kicking me offline every hour or so. This is no problem when I'm home, i just rerun dhclient and it reconnects... but when I'm gone it is a problem because my box can be offline...

so I'm trying to write the verizon sucks daemon, but it doesn't work right. I ping google every ten seconds and if i don't get a response after a certain # of pings, i run dhclient. i run ping and dhclient through the popen() call ... the google part works fine but I don't know if this is the best thing to do since I'm not really piping anything.

My question is: is there a better way to call an external program?

Probably the 'exec' family.

system() is easiest, just don't use it if your thing is suid/sgid.

Verizon LoL
 

I actually know how their network runs. It's a secure feature that had to be added in, because of ip spoofing spammers. It's annoying I know. The only way inexpensively I know to get around the rapid ip refresh is to setup an actual router to manage DHCP. I run a belkin wireless and it's great. Runs really good with every distro I've tried. I actively use Mandrake, but I've also used everything from Red Hat 9 to Slackware, and Debian on it. I even tried out some more obscure distros like Peanut, and a few others all of them picked up the connection with out a hitch.

You pick up a decent no nonsense router anymore for $40 or less. Either that or if you have some old hardware kicking around that you don't mind leaving running all the time. Put on a "router" distro on it and run it as your router, but you might pay more in hydro throughout the year than you're saving by not buying the router.

It's an annoying situation I know, but that's the joys of dynamic ip, and a world full of idiots who want to sell us crap we don't want or need. Go figure :scratch:

Anyways we all feel your pain. One sneaky way of getting it to work without have to make a new program might be just through dhclient into cron and schedule it to run every so many hours. I know VOL refreshes ip at least after 30 mins of non activity and within 8 hours regardless.

God Bless