BTW, the encap file does not change much. On average, one line in it will change per hour, as a gateway with a dynamic address updates its address (and it's often the same gateway flipping between two or three addresses), but gateways come and go at a much lower rate -- I'd guess one or two a week. So you'd be pretty safe just FTPing and processing a new encap file perhaps once a day if it winds up being a chore.

The automation in the classic FTP client is a bit difficult to use, especially when you want to use it for different sites, but the "wget" and "curl" programs can easily fetch a fixed file from a fixed server with a fixed user/password by combining them all into a URL: ftp://user:pass@server.domain/path/to/file

Of course when you fetch and process the file once a day, you will not be able to use those gateways that change IP address once a day due to local provider policy. But probably you'll never notice that... :-)

Rob