activating a dial-up connection from cygwin

[Randall R Schulz]

Rob,

At 07:01 2003-07-25, Rob wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I was wondering if there was any way to activate an existing windows 2000
>dial-up connection from the cygwin command line.

I don't know of an explicit command that will do this, and once upon a 
time before I received the blessing of DSL, I did look for such a 
thing. The best I could figure out is that if you configure Windows to 
dial on demand, then all you have to do is issue any old command that 
requires access to the Internet (nslookup, ping, etc.) to get a 
connection established.

Auto-dial is controlled (on Windows 2000 and probably XP, too) in the 
"Network and Dial-up Connections" sub-folder of the Control Panels 
folder. When that folder is displayed in Windows Explorer, a menu 
called "Advanced" appears. Choose the "Dial-up Preferences" command and 
select the "Enable autodial by location" for the appropriate location(s).

For shutting down, the only thing I know of is to set a suitable idle 
timeout. This option is controlled in the dial-up configuration's 
Properties dialog on the Options tab.

One caveat: I have found that from time to time, for reasons I could 
never discern, Windows will activate the "Disable autodial for the 
current session (until I log off)" option in the Advanced / Dial-up 
Preference dialog. When I found that my system was not dialing on its 
own, I'd have to go there and de-select that option.

Randall Schulz


>The reason I want to know is because I have a shell script that
>automatically backs up files to a remote computer (which is only accessible
>through a vpn connection).  Since I don't want to maintain the VPN
>connection all the time, I need a way to start it up (and possibly shut it
>down) from the command line.
>
>Thanks in advance,
>
>Rob.


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