[MacPerl] MacPerl for PPP connection?

[mwest@nyx.net (Michael W. J. West)]

An acquaintance wants to solidify yet another web camera;
they have it limping along.  I thought MacPerl might be a
good driver for the tasks involved.  I checked the archives
but could find no pointers; sorry if I missed the obvious.

Background:  They have the camera producing jpegs on their
mac periodically. Using a PPP dial-up connection, they then
use applescript and anarchie to send the jpeg to a unix box.

The problem comes when the connection is dropped;
apparently in trying to get a new connection, freezes are
common.  A human then needs to intervene and reboot.  This
is the main area they want to improve.

I was hoping MacPerl and judicious checking, waiting or restarting
would solve the problem.  The main hurdle for me is how to
get MacPerl or something it drives to establish a PPP
connection in a fault tolerant way.

Has anyone used modules to get MacPerl to establish a PPP
connection? Or did you roll your own? Were there Mac issues?
FAQs or module pointers would be appreciated.

And what about macppp or free-ppp or mactcp or open transport? 
I only have experience with mactcp/ppp.

What tricks were used for fault tolerance?  Any off-topic
advice about a better way to do it on the Mac platform?

Is there a way to get MacPerl to restart the Mac?  I figure
then I can put a Perl script into the start-up items folder
and let it try again.  Is this a good or dumb idea?

Any scripts or pointers would be appreciated.

Regards, Mike West mwest@nyx.net westmj@dca.net
http://www.dca.net/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/westmj/impress