1. About

GNU Alive is an auto login & keep-alive daemon for various WAN/LAN/ADSL connections provided by several (mainly Swedish) ISPs.

To mention a few: TeliaSonera ADSL, COMHEM and Tiscali. All of which use the Orbyte Wireless System from the Swedish company ServiceFactory AB.

It should be pointed out, however, that Alive is not limited to only Orbyte-based login servers. It is quite generic, see the alive.conf file for helpful hints and pointers. The --debug and --verbose options to alive is also very useful.

See the download section for the latest .tar.gz and .deb packages.

RedHat/Fedora developer? The source packages include a home brew .spec file that we could use some help with to complete. It would be so much easier to supply pre-built .rpm's as well.

2. Supported platforms

GNU Alive is tested before each release on the following currently supported platforms:

3. Build & Install

Alive makes heavy use of the GNU configure and build system. As such it is similar to most other GNU programs to configure, build and install. Below follows a very brief run-down of what steps need to be performed to build and install GNU Alive from the source .tar.gz file. For a more detailed description see the file INSTALL in the top directory of the source file.

$ cd
$ mkdir tmp; cd tmp
$ wget http://savannah.gnu.org/download/alive/alive-X.Y.Z.tar.gz
$ tar xvfz alive-X.Y.Z.tar.gz
$ cd alive-X.Y.Z
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --sysconfdir=/
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo emacs /etc/alive.conf

Here you need to define, at least, USERNAME and PASSWORD to
those you have been assigned by your ISP.

$ /usr/local/sbin/alive --login
    

4. History

GNU Alive was started by Jakob "kuba" Stasilowicz, but has been contributed to by several people. The current maintainer is Joachim Nilsson.

5. Future

Currently GNU Alive requires some setup to work. Future versions will include automatic ISP detection. Plans also exist to create a neat stand-alone GUI for monitoring the connection and providing easier access to configuration variables.

The idea is to simplify the setup almost ad-infinitum, to the point where the user only need to supply:

There are also plans to add the ability to connect via SSL/TLS to periodically get logs or status from one or several remote hosts. This could be useful for monitoring deeply embedded systems for instance — not just keeping our home WAN connection alive...

6. License

GNU Alive is free software; 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 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

GNU Alive is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.