[ale] MindSpring Mentor

[Joe]

Greg,

>What would be the effect of issuing a command through telnet to drop the
>connection when I'm done?

The connection goes away, then your telnet session says "Connection
dropped by remote host" or something like that. Works great.

All the comments about how to do what you want are exactly correct,
but I want to add that opening up an _unsecure_ Linux box to the
entire Internet in an unsupervised manner may not be a great idea. You
will probably want to install fixes for all the known security holes
(I don't know what they all are, but someone posted a pretty
comprehensive list to ALE a few months ago, I think...).

Also, it would probably be wise to set it up such that there is some
proactive step that you need to take in order to make the connection
stay up - like "touch /tmp/dont_disconnect", and have a cron job check
for that file after the connection's been up for a few minutes and
hang up the phone if it doesn't find it - rather than relying on
network activity to keep the connection open. That would minimize the
amount of access time any unauthorized intruders could get for free.

-- Joe