release notes: After many years of inactivity, GNU Alive is back. 2.x is very much pared down WRT 1.x, to the point where you might only install it out of curiosity and not actual need. That's fine, too.
README excerpt:
GNU Alive is a keep-alive program for internet connections.
It repeatedly pings a series of user-specified hosts, thereby
encouraging (one hopes) the involved networks to not disappear.
NEWS excerpt:
- 2.0.0 | 2012-08-12
- licenses upgrade: GPL 3+ / FDL 1.3
GNU Alive is now released under GPLv3+. You can redistribute it
and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public
License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either
version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
The manual is released under GNU FDL 1.3.
- complete redesign / rewrite
GNU Alive 2 is a radical simplification; it is now a "periodic
ping program" only, w/o support for the "auto-login" feature of
previous releases (nowadays that job is handled best by pppd).
If you are comfortable typing:
ping -i 149 HOST
at a shell prompt, then you do NOT need GNU Alive 2. Move on!
- new dependencies
- Guile
- ping(1) that accepts ‘-n -c COUNT’
- configuration changes
Configuration for the periodic ping is now done by frobbing
‘hosts’ and ‘period’ files under ~/.alive.d, written in a format
comprising a (very limited) set of sexps. See manual.
You can now specify multiple hosts; they are pinged round-robin.
You can now specify a range for the sleep period; in that case,
alive sleeps a random number of seconds in the (inclusive) range
each iteration.
Configuration changes are now detected at each iteration, so
that you need not restart the program for changes to take
effect. Send SIGALRM to force immediate detection.
- maintenance changes
- new maintainer
GNU Alive is now maintained by Thien-Thi Nguyen, who hopes to
continue the good work of the previous maintainers.
- tools upgrade
GNU gnulib 2012-07-24 21:35:41 (0.0.7541-dbd91)
GNU Autoconf 2.69
GNU Automake 1.12.2
Guile 1.8.7
SNUGGLE 0.1
tarball and detached signature:
http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/alive/alive-2.0.0.tar.xz
http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/alive/alive-2.0.0.tar.xz.sig
source code:
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/alive.git
homepage:
http://www.gnu.org/software/alive/
[NB: As of time of writing, the webserver still has not yet DTRT to
make index.html available. For the time being, please select
alive.html directly.]
--
Thien-Thi Nguyen ..................................... GPG key: 4C807502
. NB: ttn at glug dot org is not me .
. (and has not been since 2007 or so) .
. ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES .
........... please send technical questions to mailing lists ...........
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