[SGVLUG] My ISP restricting my connect time. How to get info fast.

[David Lawyer]

I recently posted that it took about 36 hours to upgrade my Debian to
the latest "testing" version (not really a version) using a 28.8k
modem.  I still haven't found the cause of the problem I described.

Well, after I I did all this, I got a notice from my ISP that my connect
time is being monitored and that I should consider buying more
expensive service, which I don't want to do.  There are now about 20
persons for each line, which means that I should be online for only
about an hour per day.

OK, I'll try a be efficient, but I need some help from software, if it
exists.  For one, I want to have a command to dial my ISP, exchange
mail, and hang up.  It's not so simple to implement since I use
fetchmail to get my mail and exim to send it.  Both run at the same
time via 2-way flow via my modem and phone line.  And both seem to run
as daemons which is fine if I'm online browsing the internet.

I thought that there would be others who have to pay toll charges for
dialup, etc. and thus would also want to minimize connect time.  Thus
I expected to find some software to do this.  I looked at diald but it
isn't what I want.  I use wvdial to dial up.   When I do, fetchmail
and exim both are activated.  The problem is, how to detect when
they're both done.  I would rather not have to bother to write a script
to do this.  Any suggestions.

There's also the problem of minimizing connect time using the lynx
browser.  When I go to a site that has an html doc I want to read, how
do I download all the html files the doc has been split up into?  I
manually used wget for this but it was a chore to type a long url into
it.
			David Lawyer