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[Weaver]

Maybe something to do with BT visit. Now destroyed another line but that was three hours before he came to the house and our man Scottie did not know of anything suspicious.

If I turn it off it might be unhelpful - it is probably making the whole pipe bad so ph best without it.

note to AA + self : I have disabled it in clueless, unticked the line times 2 for IPv4 IPv6 and need to remember to re-tick it. It is flapping and so unreliable.

[DaveC]

A useful feature of the firebrick is "control-switches".

Firstly, add 4 entries in your config (if using the XML, just before the first <rule-set> element):

Code: [Select]

<profile name="Line-1" set="control-switch"/>
<profile name="Line-2" set="control-switch"/>
<profile name="Line-3" set="control-switch"/>
<profile name="Line-4" set="control-switch"/>

Then in your ppp elements, add the attribute profile="Line-1" etc.

This will then give you four buttons on the home page of your Firebrick's webui that will enable/disable your four lines individually.

[Weaver]

God, that is a really useful tip. Would have saved me having to mutilate the xml and then later unmutilate it. Thanks !

[DaveC]

As I'm on a roll, you can also set profiles to be permanently on or off, if you want to temporarily disable bits of your config.

So I also have these two profiles:

Code: [Select]

<profile name="Off" set="false">
<profile name="On" set="true">

and then in the relevent bit of XML, just add profile="Off" or profile="On".

You can also have profiles based on time of day, status of PPP connections etc.

[Weaver]

How do you associate various objects with a profile? Like a #ifdef or however it might work. I have never looked at profiles although aware of their existence.

If I can get a 3G dongle going then I conceivably might or might not need to use them because I would like if posssible the one config file to work on my FB2500 too, but I fear that it will object to the dongle element. It might not, out of kindness. If it does, I doubt things like profile would help calm it though because it might just squeal at the parsing stage.

I can see a potential use for a profile, to activate something within the daily time-bands of the AA units tariff. Ultra-cheap rate 0200-0559 BST and ultra-expensive rate 0900-1759 BST mon-fri. I am not sure it could handle a syntax as complex as that as it would need an OR operator. Also there is the possible problem that those times include BST so they shift when the clocks change, which might be a very good thing, or a very bad thing. Wish you could opt for them to be in GMT, if the Brick can be made to think in GMT for the profile function, that is. I hate BST so much.

With time-band profiles I could maybe firewall-block some kinds of nuisance activity, such as auto updates. Knowing what to block is a nuisance, firstly you just do not know :-) and secondly if you did find anything you really ought to do DNS lookups in case the results of DNS lookups change eg new additional server groups as well as changes to load-balancing. Makes it a maintenance nightmare.

[DaveC]

How do you associate various objects with a profile? Like a #ifdef or however it might work. I have never looked at profiles although aware of their existence.

Every (or most) objects accept a "profile" attribute - like my ppp example above.

I've never tried the time-based profiles, I've just read that they exist.  I'm sure the lovely manual will descibe them in detail.