Notices

Regarding reverting to 2G beta.

When I have this on and connect to WLAN connection it also reconnects my 2g to 3G which is uneccesary

Most times when connecting packet connection, the change from 2g to 3g is slow, making the logging on to the internet fail. Perhaps a slight delay of internect connection is required to allow the change from 2g to 3g to happen first.

+1, experiencing same problems.

Yes. I have explained in the thread why but I forgot to put it in the FAQ. On Maemo, there is a bug (status won't fix) which prevents from knowing which connection as been launched in if-pre-up.d routine. That's why even using the Wifi, the switch to 3G happens.

The current delay is 3 seconds. This value will be customizable in the next version. Thanks for the feeback soredawg.

Is there a fix to N900 connecting the MMS apn from time to time. I've created another internet apn but it still connects to MMS apn every now and then. This is probably Maemo problem, not autodisconnect.

Also 2g/3g switch needs 2g / multi option. Would be nice feature when theres no 3g available.

But still great app!!

Hi,

I just realized that the interval that is set in the options is in fact the interval that Autodisconnect uses to check the connection. I was thinking, that Autodisconnect checks every minute and and looks at the <timepsan> for the amount of data. With actual behaviour the steps might get real big until it checks the next time.

An example:
time set to 5 Minutes, traffic set to 5kB.
Connection starts, some apps are downloading data, which takes 2 minutes and uses 100kB. After 3rd minute the data flow is as good as zero. In 5th minute autodisconnect checks the value the first time, counts an amount of 100kB and goes to background again. In 10th minute it checks the second time and looks at the interval minute 6 'til minute 10. The amount is less than 5kB so it will disconnect.

I'd find it much better if it would check the traffic every minute, calculating the traffic for the set timespan. With this setting in the example above it would first time check in minute 5 (~100kB), in minute 6 (~50kB) and in minute 7 (~0kB) and then closing the connection.

Reason for not setting the timespan to 1 minute: when browsing the web or even installing an update it happens often that there is no traffic for a minute or two. Having the connection getting closed immediately is not that funny.

Reason for not liking a that large interval: I use alarmed for hourly connection via gprs. Counting the additional online-time over one day might sum up to more than an hour. This is a really bad impact on battery life and might make the difference between having some battery life left in the evening or not.

It would be really nice if you could consider changing the behaviour.

@x-lette: as you said, if you're browsing the web or doing any other network operation that requires user input, you'd have the connection dropping constantly -- either that or, even with your proposed system, you'd have to set the limit so low that it'd actually take zero activity to have autodisconnect close the connection. In my experience, if there's an active connection on and you either have network-bound widgets on the dashboard and/or apps in the background that fetch data from the net, you'll always get some activity.

It's tricky getting something like this right. For automated retrieval of information, your idea would work great. But for all those times when you're actually doing something yourself, it'd be tricky configuring it so it wouldn't trip you up at every turn.

I'd propose the following that, despite not being perfect and coming with its own drawbacks, would serve to alleviate most people's problems with the intervals -- let us have 2 interval settings for connection checking, each with its own bandwidth limit:

a) an "Initial" grace period, and associated traffic threshold, that you could set to a higher limit (which you'd then tailor to match the typical usage time and bandwidth of your automated retrieval apps/widgets/push-email .. say 3 minutes and a total of 120 KB, or 40KB/min for x-lette's example)

b) the interval at which autodisconnect would check the connection status and traffic after that initial period, which you'd tailor to more human-involved tasks, like performing updates, browsing the web, etc.

Either that or allow a "special" setting to be enabled that would allow you to configure something like "monitor traffic every minute for an initial period of X minutes and as soon as a single minute goes by where traffic fell below a certain threshold Y, close connection" -- for automated tasks that take less than those X minutes to complete where you're guaranteed to have Z/min traffic, you'd set Y to be very close to Z resulting in a closed connection pretty much as soon as the automated tasks completed.

If, however, in addition to the automated tasks, you're also doing something else (like browsing the web or replying to emails, whatever) that extra traffic would keep the connection alive and if the session were to extend beyond the initial period of X minutes, the "normal" threshold and interval would kick in and you could set these to be a bit more lax (say, by having a bigger interval or a lower threshold) which would help to keep the connection alive for those human-input sessions.

Did I make it too confusing?

For any of these two "systems", or even the way the app works right now, I'd suggest people put autodisconnect into "testing mode" by setting the interval(s) to 1 minute and using a very low threshold (say 1B/min, yes BYTE .. this will result in the connection being kept alive for the tests) and then do a "tail -f /var/log/autodisconnect.log" so you can gauge how much is being received every minute. That'd allow people to really tailor the intervals to their usage/needs.

calvin can you add gps and network base location disconnect to autodisconnect?

I'm really impressed by this app. The feature I appreciate most is the automatic 2G <-> 3G switching.

Sometimes it doesn't quite keep up however, especially when coming in and out of the browser. Specifically disconnecting the idle connection seems to be a problem, thus also keeping 3G on, when it could go 2G already.

I will experiment with raising the kB amount that determines if its idle or not.

I'm also using the 2G/3G App switcher, and this appears to interfere with the app somewhat as well.

EDIT: Yeah I set it up at 100Kb and now it works like a charm. Thank you so much for this app!

Okay I've been playing around with this for a couple of hours now, and it seems that having multiple windows in the browser is enough to confuse the application.

Just now I was surfing in two different windows and I got a message of AutoDisconnect being active. It then cut off my internet connection as I was loading a page.

I will try to figure out the steps to reproducing this problem.

Both pics/videos are now stored under DCIM folder now, which can be accessed from file manager. hope this helps.