cron jobs on KR1?

boerio · EVDO Fledgling Joined: 29 Mar 2006 Posts: 22

So this might be for tz1, since he's been hacking the KR1 a lot.

Are there any default cron jobs on the KR1? Perhaps something that checks to see if the pppd daemon is actually running?

I notice from time to time in the log file that the /bin/ip-down will get run after pppd exits ("Terminating on signal 15"). Searches on Google seem to indicate that Signal 15 is when the pppd detects a hangup.

So is there something that automatically causes the KR1 to reconnect? Is it in cron? Or does the /bin/ip-down script try to run /bin/ip-up?

- Jeff

Mackieman · EVDO Junkie Joined: 31 Oct 2005 Posts: 453

The PPPd is designed to ping a list of hosts every 30 seconds to determine if the link is still live. If it isn't, the reconnect/reset process begins. I'm currently greazing the cogs in my head trying to come up with a nicer way to accomplish this.

Anyway, that function is coded into the PPPd; KR1 does not use cron jobs that I am aware of.

PrimeSuspect · EVDO Newbie Joined: 03 May 2006 Posts: 8

The current method definitely doesn't seem to be the most efficient. Not to mention it doesn't take into account if there are any routing issues between your connection and the list of hosts it is trying to ping. This could also be another reason why some people don't get as good of performance on the KR1 as they do with the EVDO card in their laptop. I would at least think that you could skip the ping test if any traffic has recently went across the WAN link?

boerio · EVDO Fledgling Joined: 29 Mar 2006 Posts: 22

I'm no network genius by any stretch of the imagination. (When I got hired into my role as a sys admin, I had a 1hr interview with a network guy. After he asked me all his questions, to which I answered almost all of them with "I don't know", we still had 45 minutes to kill.)

But to characterize "live connections" via a ping command doesn't seem to be the right thing to do. Or maybe it is. Are the sites that are used for this contact the upstream DNS server or the gateway? Or are they known IP addresses to the KR1?

If the ping addresses are internally generated by the KR1, is that the right thing to do? What if there's some network flop going on and the ones it tries to connect to are off the air? Initiate a restart, even though its connection is still alive otherwise?

Any way to watch traffic and say that "any network traffic in the past 30 seconds?" If that fails, try generating some network traffic (RPC info? ping? otherwise?).

Or maybe if the IP addresses were generated from the route table? But that's pretty limited, probably.

- Jeff

tz1 · Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 8:00 am Post subject:

There is no cron job as such, but as MM pointed out there is a periodic ping watchdog. The "webs" program may have threads which act like cron, but I'm not certain about that.

I know of no clearly periodic process on the KR1 - they are all event driven.