Automating Mac Dialup with OTPPP

Mike Weber (MIWEBER@davidson.edu)
Sat, 07 Jun 1997 12:06:12 -0500 (EST)

Now that the new client can establish a connection and then let it
drop, I thought it'd be great to just let this puppy run on my home
machine and let it dial up when needed. However, as many of you may
have noticed, Open Transport PPP puts up a modal dialog box every time
the connection drops due to an inactivity timeout. This modal dialog
seems to completely interrupt key processing. Curses! I couldn't
find a switch to shut this off, BUT I did find another solution:
Download a FREE control panel called Okey Dokey Pro. It will hit the
default button in any modal dialog after a user-defined amount of
time. You can get it by going to www.shareware.com and searching for
'dokey' in the Mac index.

I've set my PPP to drop after 1 minute of inactivity, and I've set
OkeyDokey Pro to respond to modal dialogs put up by DESChall and the
Finder in 5 seconds. Now the client is not hung up by OT's silly modal
dialogs for more than 5 seconds or so each cycle. Dialogs put up by
other programs are not automatically dismissed, in case you need to
run something else that periodically puts up dialogs that you don't
want automatically dismissed. You can set which programs are affected.
Not bad! :)

Here's another interesting phenomenon: While OT PPP is connected, key
processing on my machine runs about 685 kk/sec. The instant the
connection drops, the search rate improves almost 9% to 745 kk/sec!
This happens even when all other applications have been quit (using
the 'quit all apps' menu option in Deschall.) I had no idea the OT
stack was such a CPU hog.... or is there another explanation?

Anyway, now all of you dialup Mac users can let the client run 24/7
just like the lucky folks with a permanent connection. :)
Have fun!
Mike
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Mike Weber * Coordinator of Academic Computing Applications Support
miweber@davidson.edu * Davidson College * Davidson, NC * (704) 892-2429