blinkd1

Usage

Overview

These programs help you monitor things like incoming calls on your voice box or incoming faxes. E.g. they blink Scroll-Lock LED for incoming voice calls and Num-Lock LED for incoming faxes. Normally, two daemons are started, one for the Scroll-Lock LED, and one for the Num-Lock LED. The program blink will ask the server to blink the specified LED with the given rate.

Usage

On Debian GNU/Linux blinkd is started with the --both-leds option from /etc/init.d/blinkd, unless the system administrator changed this. If you like to count something, e.g. incoming calls on your voice mailbox, incoming faxes in your spool or whatever, just write a script, that calls

blink --rate n

for the first thing you like to count and

blink --second --rate m

for the second thing you like to count. n and m are the current numbers of things you like to count. The first blink refers to the Scroll-Lock LED, the second one refers to the Num-Lock LED.

Options

-2 --second

If two blinkd processes are running, contact the second one. The second blinkd process handles the Num-Lock LED, while the first one takes care of the Scroll-Lock LED.

-h --help

Gives a short help on the command line options and exit.

-v --version

Give a short version information and exit.

-w s --password=s

This option does not work yet. It will be used later for restricting the access to those using the same password as the one that blinkd uses.

Options

-b --both-leds

Start two entities of the blinkd server, one for the Scroll-Lock, and one for the Num-Lock LED. The second blinkd daemon uses the tcp port one above the first process.

-f t --off-time=t

Set the off blink time to the value t. The unit is one tenth of a second.

-h --help

Gives a short help on the command line options and exit.

-n --numlockled

If only one blinkd daemon is started, it defaults to handle the Scroll-Lock LED. This option overrides the default.

-o t --on-time=t

Set the on blink time to the value t. The unit is one tenth of a second.

-p t --pause=t

Set the pause time between blinking to the value t. The unit is one tenth of a second.

-r n --rate=n

Start the blinkd daemon with the given blinking rate.

-s --scrolllockled

If only one blinkd daemon is started, it defaults to handle the Scroll-Lock LED. So this option is not really necessary.

-t n --tcp-port=n

Use the tcp port n. If two blinkd daemons are started using the --both-leds options, the tcp port n+1 also will be used.

-v --version

Give a short version information and exit.

-w s --password=s

This option does not work yet. It will be used later for restricting the access, so that the blink user has to use the same password as this.

Files

/etc/init.d/blinkd starts and stops the blinkd daemon.

Examples

An example for the use of blinkd with the vbox program (an ISDN answering machine) is provided in /usr/doc/blinkd/examples/standard.tcl. Another example for use with the mgetty fax program is provided in /usr/doc/blinkd/examples/new_fax.

Thanks

All important code is stolen from tleds and xtleds, made by Jouni Lohikoski <[email protected]>, only the bugs are mine alone. Paul Slootman <[email protected]> built the utility on Debian GNU/Linux alpha and corrected some of my typos.

Date

Version 0.1 released on 1998-09-24 or so.