Running PPP via crontab

[Andrew P.]

Odhiambo Washington wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I have setup a FreeBSD box which a friend of mine will run as a mail
> server/firewall in his SOHO, using dialup (modem) to his ISP. Almost
> everything is setup and running, even ppp can work when I manually
> run through the dialup procedure.
> 
> I don't have much problem configuring what he will run on this box, but
> one aspect has pinned me down. The ppp _MUST_ not run in "auto" or
> "ondemand" modes. It must be initiated manually.
> 
> I would like to make a crontab entry that will run ppp after every one
> hour. I don't have a problem with crontab, but how to invoke ppp via it
> ;)
> 
> I'd appreciate some hand-holding here. What shall I put as the command
> that will be run by cron?


1 */1 * * * root /usr/sbin/ppp -quiet -ddial -nat mtu

Something like this where "root" is the user
to run ppp as (remove it in case you're not
a superuser and not editing /etc/crontab),
"-ddial" is the mode - change it to whatever
you need, "-nat" enables nat (you can also do
it from ppp.conf), and "mtu" is the section
of ppp.conf to load.

Best wishes,
Andrew P.