Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Casey Harkins <charkins AT upl.cs.wisc.edu>]

On Sat, 3 Apr 2004, Hamish Greig wrote:

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> Apologies in advance for asking this stupid question.
> Does our network initscript handle ppp or adsl/pppoe connections ? or is it 
> only for ethernet ?
> If not, could ppp (dialup) and rp-pppoe users please tell me if they use a 
> different script to bring up their network, or if they have to do it 
> manually, what command they use.
> Also I find minicom hasn't been included on the ISO for some time, is it no 
> longer needed, should it be replaced by wvdial or something else ? (over 2 
> years since I dealt with a ppp modem connection)
> I know it must seem like I am being lazy here, but as I don't actually have 
> either types of hardware to test this on I don't have much chance to test 
> experiment and learn in my usual fashion.

minicom can be useful to verify a modem is working correctly, or tweaking 
the default chat script the iso installs for ppp users. It might be enough 
to offer it as an optional spell to be installed.

Bringing up the ppp connection is done using 'pon <peer>' where <peer> is
the file created in /etc/ppp/peers which handles the connection. pon/poff
will default to "isp" as the peer. The iso's have generally prompted the
user for their username/password, put this info into a chat script
(/etc/ppp/chat/isp) and created the necessary peer file
(/etc/ppp/peers/isp). This is where the weakest point is in our ppp setup.  
The default chat script only works for some isps, not all. Using wvdial
could solve problems these problems. In addition, many isps now require
the use of pap/chap to authenticate which require placing the
user/password in /etc/ppp/{pap-secrets,chap-secrets} and setting some
options in the peer file to require pap or chap authentication. I don't 
think wvdial can handle pap/chap.

I've considered writing a pppconf script to sit along side netconf, but
have only limited experience with this stuff.

-casey