I've dug through the last couple of months' worth of this mailing list,
but can't find what I'm looking for... the previous thread with this
subject sounded promising, but alas.
Anyway: we have a dial-on-demand system here in our department. The
background on this system is that the "official" mailhost for the
company is somewhat unreliable, and to ensure a stable email connection
we installed our own mailhost. Our mailhost has a permanent DNS
capability (which works via the corporate firewall), and a
dial-on-demand ISDN connection to an ISP. So far so good.
Our mailhost also works as a web proxy, using the wwwoffle package (very
nice!). Inspired by wwwoffle, I began wondering if exim could be driven
in the same sort of way.
Wwwoffle can be in a number of states: offline, online, and dial-on-demand.
- In the online state, requests are fetched directly unless already in
the cache, in which case the remote site is checked to see whether the
cached data has been expired yet.
- In the dial-on-demand state, anything in the cache is delivered; if
the requested page is not in the cache, a connection is made to
retrieve it.
- In the offline state, requests are noted for later retrieval; stuff in
the cache is simply delivered.
The switching between online and dial-on-demand is done via a command in
/etc/ppp/ip-up and /etc/ppp/ip-down.
Now, I currently have queue_smtp set, so that exim doesn't immediately
cause a dialout when a message is sent. However, I'd love to see some
way of telling exim it's ok to immediately deliver a message when the
connection is up and running (otherwise it'll be queued, and perhaps
cause a dialout when 'exim -q' is run, and waste money).
I can't currently see how this could be done, short of editing the
config file every time (yuck!). Could something be fabricated out of
checking for the existence of a file, for example? I'm sure there are
other people who need something like this (even if they don't know it
yet :-).
Thanks,
Paul Slootman
--
home: paul@??? | work: paul@??? | debian: paul@???
http://www.wurtel.demon.nl | Murphy Software, Enschede, the Netherlands
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