Using DPPP on a dial-up ISP Account - Detlef Pleiss, Aug-21-97

DPPP can be used on a dial-up account to your ISP, even with a dynamically
assigned IP address.

If your line to the ISP is supposed to be up and running 24/7, the only thing
you need is to make sure the connection is re-established on carrier drop. On
Windows 95, "Dunce" can do that for you. If the ISP hangs up on you after some
time of inactivity you'll need one of the utilities that generate some sort of
net activity to keep the line up. "PingPong" is one such utility.

If you want the line to be up only when used, you need some sort of
dial-on-demand, that connects the BBS machine to your ISP automatically
whenever needed (speak on DPPP startup). On Windows 95 the dial-on-demand
feature gets installed with Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE), so you need
that installed even if you don't use the browser. You activate dial-on-demand
from within the Internet properties in Config Panel and choose one of the
configured DUN connections to be used by it.
You will also need some means of hanging up on an unused connection. To
achieve this you can not use the feature from MSIEs Config Panel Internet
property, as that only recognizes activity from within MSIE itself. You also
can not just hang up at the end of a (DPPP) call, at least on a multinode BBS,
as another node may still be using the Internet connection. The recommended
solution is to use the inactivity hangup feature of the modem, most modern
modems support it. On Windows 95 you configure it from within the modem
properties for the modem that is used by the given DUN connection.
You would still need "Dunce" to automatically press buttons in DUN dialogs for
you. In contrast to a 24/7 connection you need to configure it to abort a
dropped connection, when the modem inactivity hangup kicks in, so not trying
to re-dial then. In order to do so, you manually edit the line in DUNCE.INI
to read "ForceReconnect=2".

Dial-on-demand in Windows 95 only kicks in for 32bit software, so it does not
get activated if you run 16bit PBBS / DPPP. In this case you need to
configure a batch file "To launch Dialer" in DPPPSET. If this parameter is
given (speak not empty), DPPP executes the given batch file on each startup.
Before doing so, it creates a file DPPP<node>.DU. DPPP then waits until this
file disappears again. So the batch file indicates when it's finished by
deleting this file. The filename is given as parameter %1 to the batch file.
The batch file therefore must end with a "del %1" line. The easiest way on
Windows 95 with Dunce is to generate some net activity using a 32bit program,
so dial-on-demand kicks in. A recommended batch reads:

ping -a -n 1 <IP address of DNS server>
del %1

The "ping" command comes with Win95. With the "-a" parameter to look up host
names it will initiate a dial-out (it does not without this parameter). The
"-n 1" makes it ping the server only once as to not waste time for multiple
pings. The IP address can be whatever you like, an IP at the ISP site is
preferable as to get a reliable and fast response.

Another possible command for the batch file would dial your ISP directly.
The syntax is:

rundll rnaui.dll,RnaDial <connection id>

Note: The RnaDial and components of the command line are case sensitive.

With a dial-up connection, it may happen that the caller who initiates an
automatic dial-out fails to connect on the first try, but connects without a
problem when dialing into DPPP a second time. The point is, the PPP definition
allows for about 30 seconds to get a response from the remote side. DPPP does
require the Internet connection up and running before it can answer a callers
PPP packets. So if dialing up your ISP takes more than about 30 seconds it may
happen that the calling client gives up beforehand and hangs up, while the BBS
machine is still busy dialing out. Nothing can be done about it at the BBS
side. What the client can do if it really bothers him to dial in a second
time is to use a script file to launch DPPP from an ANSI menu, a script that
waits for the "DPPP Ready ..." message, which only appears after the BBS
dial-out is completed, so DPPP is then ready to answer the PPP negotiation.

Homepages:
Dunce:    http://www.vecdev.com
PingPong: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/5297/products.html
