Perl script that periodically ping a few websites in order to keep a dial-up connection alive

I created this script circa 2004 to help a relative who kept getting disconnected from her dial-up connection because the ISP dropped the connection after 20 minutes of inactivity. This easily happended when, for example, she was composing a long email.

The way this script works is simple: it is invoked periodically and does an HTTP HEAD request on a randomly selected website.

(For those of you who are not old enough to have used a dial-up modem check out the horrible sound it made.)

This script was used on a Windows pc but should work on any platform.

Instructions for installing on Windows:

1. Install ActivePerl 5.x
2. Put the dial_up_keep_alive.pl script somewhere on the pc
3. Create a Windows Scheduled Task that runs the dial_up_keep_alive.pl script periodically, say every minute

I originally tried to write the script in Java as a daemon-like task. I'de been doing a lot of Java at the time. However, the JVM behaved like this:

1. The JVM would start and reported the pc's IP address as 127.0.0.1
2. The script would sleep for a while
3. The pc established the dial-up connection
4. The script woke up but still reported the IP address as 127.0.0.1!

Anyway, running Java on the pc was pretty heavyweight.

A Perl script nicely hit the spot!

MIT. See LICENSE