From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Aug 4 20:47:17 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id UAA29848 for freebsd-questions-outgoing; Tue, 4 Aug 1998 20:47:17 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from freeside.fc.net (freeside.fc.net [207.170.70.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id UAA29805 for ; Tue, 4 Aug 1998 20:46:49 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jdunham@freeside.fc.net) Received: (from jdunham@localhost) by freeside.fc.net (8.9.1/8.8.8) id WAA07465 for freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org; Tue, 4 Aug 1998 22:45:45 -0500 (CDT) From: Jerry Dunham Message-Id: <199808050345.WAA07465@freeside.fc.net> Subject: Need help for script to prod ISP's sendmail To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Date: Tue, 4 Aug 1998 22:45:45 -0500 (CDT) Reply-To: jerry@dunham.org X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL31H (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG This isn't really a FreeBSD question, but I don't know of another place to ask it or a good place to look it up. If you know of one, feel free to point me in the right direction. I connect to my ISP via PPP over an ordinary modem. With the exception of mail from mailing lists, my mail comes to my home machine (rider) at dunham.org. Since my ISP as a matter of policy will not call rider, my mail sticks in their sendmail queue until the next time I establish contact, and then only comes across if I have the link up when their sendmail queue happens to run (every half hour). This means that those who send me mail often get back an error message that tells them sendmail has been unable to deliver for 4 hours. The mail still gets through when next I make contact, but these error message make many people think their mail isn't getting through, and eliminates my ability to use my own address for mailing lists (which usually choke on the error messages). I know very little about programming, but can manage extremely simple scripts. What I'd like to do is write something that would do: telnet myisp.net 25 wait for my ISP to respond, then tell it: etrn rider.dunham.org etrn dunham.org quit This could be run once every three hours, eliminating the dreaded sendmail complaint. What I don't know how to do is the "wait for my ISP to respond" part. This would seem to be rather like the chat script PPP uses to log me in, but I don't understand how that works. Any useful suggestions will be appreciated. -- Jerry Dunham FreeBSD Atarian ordinaire jerry@dunham.org (512)335-0674 (H) jdunham@awesome-f0.us.dell.com (512)728-4026 (O) E Pluribus Unix To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message