Acincy.120 NET.general utzoo!duke!cincy!chris Sat May 23 13:32:35 1981 Poor man's auto dialer At the University of Cincinnati, we were very excited about uucp, and anxious to get onto the net. There were some problems, however. We were licensed for V7, but didn't have it running on our machine (an 11/60) yet. With the help of Duke University, we got a version that works on V6, and eveything was fine. Except that the only equipment we have to connect to the phone system is an acoustic coupler (Bell 103 style). I quickly figured out that by manipulating the L.sys file, I could fake uucp into thinking that we had a hardwired line to the system, and that it was OK at this time to call, so that what I had to do was dial the other system, twiddle L.sys, and start uucico, all quickly enough that the login sequence didn't time out. In addition, I was constantly having to look in the dialcodes file to find the numbers (I quickly found that I knew many of them by heart). Needless to say, this was a time consuming and error prone mechanism. I messed L.sys up many times, and quickly got tired of having to su back and forth to fix things. Also, it was impossible for me to explain all the mechanism to one of our operators and expect him to get it right without screwing something up, which would always get me a phone call at an opportune time to fix things. So, I wrote a program that I called uucall, that takes care of this type of thing. It temporarily modifies L.sys so that the system to be called has 'Any' in the times to call slot, and has the name of a hardwired line in the connection slot. It also goes into L-dialcodes and prompts the user with the number to dial. When the user indicates that the connection is made, uucall starts uucico up with the appropriate argu- ments, as well as any that the user may have wished to be passed through. It is, in effect, a poor man's auto-dialer. Anyone who is interested in this software is welcome to it. I have a manual entry and modified makefile, as well as the source. Drop me a note on the net and I will be more than happy to uucp the stuff to you. There is only one drawback to the program -- it is up to you to decide which systems must be called. It does not attempt to analyze the work that is queued. As our L.sys grows, this is becoming a problem. It is currently neces- sary to invoke uucall for each system you wish to call. I don't yet know how to best attack this problem, whether to cycle through all systems in L.sys (but you may be polled by some system...) or to only do those systems for which work is queued (which may cause some incoming mail to be missed) or both or neither. I would appreciate any input you might have. Chris Kent (duke!cincy!chris) University of Cincinnati EE Dept. May 23, 1981 ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.