Steve Meredith wrote: > Turns out that Microsoft has changed the way autodial is triggered in > NT-based OSs. You have to start a service to get it to work for any > non-MS apps. And that service only works if you don't have an ethernet > connection.
Well not exactly. The issue is that of a default gateway. If an adapter is found then no address mappings are included by default in the dial-up entry. If no adapter is found then the dial-up adapter is the default gateway. Manual addresses can be added to any dial-up entry via control panel and the auto-dialer should dial if not already connected when that address is tried (through the socket layer). However, this is still very messy. > > So, for NT-based systems, we should probably call into the OS ourselves > to trigger autodial, if the system is configured for it. I don't think > launching autodial at client startup is the right thing. Perhaps we > should do it when a network error is encountered. This is because a user > might be launching the browser to look at a local page or mail to > compose some offline messages, in which case autodial would be > inappropriate. > The MS apps (IE, Outlook, ...) appear to be using InternetAutoDial which is a WinINet function. Unfortunately, this is part of IE (4.0 and later). There are simple functions to check for internet connectivity and to dial and hangup if approptiate. This is one of those areas where MS network functionality is bundled in the browser. RAS provides dialing and hangup functionality (via RasDial) but there is nothing automated that it will do in terms of checking for existing internet connectivity. Both methods are found in the Platform SDK. > What do you think of this approach? Better ideas? Please see the bug for > all the details, and make any comments in there. > IMO it might be better to dial on leaving the locally reachable zone either by subnet, resloving a non-local name or leaving the local computer. If we can detect a net error quick enough then your suggestion could work but DNS timeout's can sometimes take a while. Anyway that's my 2 cents worth. Good luck and yell if you need some help. David
