samba - Feb 2000 - pppd/smbclient question

I have been trying to edit ip-up and ip-down so that when the link goes
up or down it sends a message to my windows machine for winpopup.  I
edited the last line of ip-down to look like this:

echo "The link is down" | smbclient -M mymachine


when I invoke ip-down by hand, it works fine.

when I kill the power to the modem, I get no message.  I logged the
output of the command, and it runs fine, no errors.  I read in the pppd
manpage that it redirects all scripts to  /dev/null/.  Is this the
problem, or is it a shell thing?

I also tried making a refreshing webpage so I could mount it over samba
and have it sitting in a browser winow, but something is caching and the
browser doesn't change when the page does.


Any hints?

Jeremy

>
> > when I invoke ip-down by hand, it works fine.
> >
> > when I kill the power to the modem, I get no message.  I logged the
> > output of the command, and it runs fine, no errors.  I read in the
pppd
> > manpage that it redirects all scripts to  /dev/null/.  Is this the
> > problem, or is it a shell thing?
>
> One possibility for it not working when the script is run
> automatically is smbclient not being in the PATH when run by pppd or
> someother similar difference in environment.
Already checked.  Runs fine both ways.
>
>
> To find out for sure though you could capture the output by changing
> your line to:
>
> (echo "The link is down" | smbclient -M mymachine) > /tmp/log
2>&1
>
> which will capture both stdout and stderr to /tmp/log so you can see
> it.
>
Also done (this is how I know smbclient runs).  It prints a 'successful'
message on stdout and nothing on stderr.
This is why I'm writing to the group.  The script works fine when invoked
from
the command line.  But when invoked by pppd, it appears to run fine, producing
normal output, etc, but not the result I want - which is a message sent across
the network.  The copy commands I was using to manipulate the webpage work
from the script fine when run by pppd.

Does samba/windows cache files?  Because I copied over a file on my Linux box
and then opened it in notepad remotely, and it still showed the old contents.

I suspect I should upgrade, my version of Debian is about a year old now.