isdnbutton - traffic light to start/stop ISDN connection

isdnbutton

isdnbutton This is a small X based program that allows for easy activation and deactivation of the demand-dialing feature of the Linux-ISDN subsystem. It can also be used to initiate connections without using the demand-dialing feature.

It displays a symbolized traffic light. When the light is red, no demand-dialing is possible; when it is yellow, demand-dialing has been enabled but there is currently no connection using any of the ISDN network devices; when it is green, there is at least one active connection using an ISDN network device. You can interactively switch between red and yellow/green by clicking with the left mouse button into the window; the right mouse button pops up a menu to select between different actions --- this can be used if you want to connect to different providers.

isdnbutton is intended to be run inside of the FVWM button bar, but you can also run it stand-alone. It has to be run as root or using sudo(1), super(1) or some other suid wrapper in order to access the ISDN and network devices!

At the very least, you will have to provide two shell scripts in /etc/isdn/isdnbutton. connect will be called when demand-dialing is to be enabled (i.e. when the traffic light is red) and disconnect will be called when it is to be disabled (i.e. when the traffic light is yellow or green). This can be done either by pressing the left mouse button or by selecting the shell script from the menu that pops up when you press the right mouse button.

Typically, connect will have instructions for adding an outgoing telephone number (e.g. "isdnctrl addnum isdn0 out 555-1234"), and setting up a default route (e.g. "route add default gw 192.168.0.1 metric 1"); disconnect will then have instructions for removing the default route (e.g. "route del default"), for removing all outgoing telephone numbers (e.g. "isdnctrl delnum isdn0 out 555-1234"), and for hanging up (e.g. "isdnctrl hangup isdn0").

Whenever you depress the right mouse button, isdnbutton will scan all of the files in the /etc/isdn/isdnbutton directory for a magic signature (this signature can appear anywhere in the file). If it finds the string `ISDNBUTTON:' it will interpret the following words as the title for a menu entry (note! there must be a space character after the colon!). If the directory contains at least one file that contains this signature, then the connect and disconnect scripts will not be added to the menu unless they also contain a signature. (You can still call connect and disconnect by pressing the left mouse button, though!)

You can use this feature to add arbitrary shell scripts to the menu. Use alphabetically sorted filenames to determine the order in the menu. You can even dynamically rebuild the menu when needed. The directory gets re-scanned whenever the right mouse button is pressed.

A lot of isdnbutton's behavior can be configured with application resources. A sample application resource is installed at /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Isdnbutton.

It is highly advisable, that you configure syslogd(8) to log all messages of priority warn or above. The output should not only go into a log file, but also into either the xconsole(1) window or on a free virtual console! isdnbutton uses the facility user. All error messages, that are output when connect, disconnect, or any of the other scripts is run, will be sent to syslogd(8).

This program works fine, if you connect to just a limited number of ISP's. For anything more advanced than this, you are likely to exceed the limits of isdnbutton. If you think, you have come up with an unusual trick for using ISDN-button in more advanced applications, I would like to know about it.

/etc/isdn/isdnbutton/*

syslogd(8), xconsole(1), isdnctrl(8), sudo(1), super(1).

This program was written by Markus Gutschke <gutschk@uni-muenster.de>, Schlage 5a, D-48268 Greven-Gimbte, Germany.

This manual page was written by Roland Rosenfeld <roland@debian.org>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).