Programming Jabber

Dialup System Watch

These days, it’s becoming increasingly common to have a server at home with a dialup connection to the Internet. Your data, your latest developments, and your mail are stored on there. This works really well when you’re telecommuting and pulling those late night hacking sessions at home; you have access to all your information and can connect to the Net.

For many people, however, the reality is that it’s not just at home where the work gets done. Consultants, freelancers, and people with many customers have their work cut out for them in traveling to different sites to complete jobs. One of the biggest issues in this respect, especially in Europe where dialup and pay-per-minute connections still outweigh fixed or flat-rate connections, is the accessibility of the information on the server at home, sitting behind a modem. In a lot of cases, the expense of leaving the server dialed up for the duration of the trip is far too great to be justified.

One solution is to have the server dial up and connect to the Internet at regular intervals, say, every hour or two, and remain connected for 5 or 10 minutes. If you need access to the information or need to log on to your server and run a few tests, you can hold the connection open, once you’ve connected to it, by running a ping, for example.

The problem here, though, is timing. Due to the inevitable synchronization problems between wristwatch and PC clock, eddies in the space-time continuum, and the fact that people ...