[aclug-L] Re: Mail server and proxy account again.

["Dale W Hodge" <dwh@xxxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: aclug-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:aclug-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On
> Behalf Of Ryan Claycamp
> Sent: Friday, October 15, 1999 3:08 PM
> To: Aclug discussion
> Subject: [aclug-L] Mail server and proxy account again.
>
>
> Once I started getting traffic for everybody, especially mailing lists,
> through our proxy account, I discovered my fetchmail/procmail
> configuration wasn't working.  After reading the procmail FAQ, I learned
> procmail doesn't work very well for what I wanted.  I switched to the
> multi-drop function of fetchmail.  When you do the line: user USERTHERE
> is USERHERE here, you do: user USERTHERE is USERHERE1 USERHERE2
> USERHERE3 etc. here.  I also had to reconfigure our mailer to accept our
> domain name as well as the local domain name.
>
> My question now is how do I make sure I have a connection to the
> Internet before I attempt to get our mail?  I get error messages from
> cron that fetchmail couldn't find the mail server, it only works when
> the Internet connection is already up.  What script file could I run
> with fetchmail's preconnect command to check if the connection is up and
> if not, get it up before continuing?

I just run fetchmail in my ip-up script:
 fetchmail -a -d 180 -t 20 -L /var/log/fetchlog

And in my ip-down script:
  fetchmail --quit

Then you can use cron if you want to bring the link up at certain times of
the day. If you are using diald, you will want to make sure that your
polling interval for fetchmail is a couple minutes longer than your time-out
so fetchmail doesn't keep the link up.