Re: Dial-up connection status in Linux

On Tue, 15 Aug 2006, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.dcom.modems, in article
<FNnEg.618896$Fs1.351234@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Allen Weiner
wrote:

Thanks for your reply. I reposted this question to comp.os.linux.networking.
I posted here first because I'm not sure there are any Linux users around
who still use dial-up <g>.

Oh, I can assure you that they still exist - lots of them, which is why
there are many different "helper tools" built with that in mind. I saw
your post in c.o.l.n and noticed what appears to be a usable answer with
'gkrellm' mentioned as one solution. I'm sure there are others - it's
just that I don't use the GUI tools.

My ISP terminates my connection after eight hours. My connection got
terminated during the last thirty seconds of a 110 MB YUM update.

Wheeeee!!! I suppose it could be worse - I've done an install just before
a version got updated, and while the basic distribution was 3.7 Gigs (on
6 CDs), the updates might total a _very_ large numbers.

[compton ~]$ grep -c rpm fc5.06.04.06
830
[compton ~]$ awk '{total += $5 }; END {print total }' < fc5.06.04.06
3.1692e+09
[compton ~]$

Lessee, FC5 was 2207 packages total, and 3.1 Gigs, but there are 830
packages on the updates server, totalling 3.1 Gigs (there are obvious
repeats - like openoffice.org-core at 85 Megs a pop).

Fortunately, YUM has a download manager functionality so the eight hour
download was not lost.

When I was updating over the phone, I'd ftp into the updates server,
which honored *nix directory commands - use 'ls -lrt' to get a list sorted
by date, with the latest at the end, then created a quicky script to
download the individual packages (based on what's available compared to
what's installed - 'rpm -qa' tells that) - in the case of FC5, the largest
seem to be 85 Megs. Most ftp servers and modern clients also understand
the 'reget' command, allowing picking up an aborted download. Once all the
updates were on a local disk, 'rpm -F /path/to/updates/*.rpm' and Bob's
your mother's brother.

Old guy
.