On Sun, Jul 01, 2001 at 02:49:43AM -0700, Sidney Brooks wrote: | For those of you who tried to help with my problem, several weeks | ago, here is a statement of the problem and solution.
| After following all suggestions offered here and consulting with a | computer technician, the conclusion was that it had to be the modem. | I bought a new Diamond modem and both versions of linux now get me | online. Our guess is that I had a line surge that knocked out a part | of the modem that linux requires, but that Windows can do without. It is always good to find a solution :-). | I still have two minor problems that I may be able to work out myself. In | order to get on line with Debian, I must use ppp. Minicom and wvdial | connect but fail to authenticate. As Wayne mentioned, minicom and wvdial aren't supposed to authenticate or maintain a ppp connection, that is pppd's job :-). minicom is an _interactive_ dialer. It is only inteneded to dial the modem, no more, no less. Also, because it is interactive, it is only really useful when determining what the dialog with the ISP should be, and then it is essential. wvdial is a configurable dialer that tries to be smart and figure out how to authenticate the dial-in with your ISP, then hand off to pppd to authenticate and maintain the ppp connection. Personally I don't use wvdial -- I had some difficulty with it early on and never went back to try it again. I used minicom to see what my ISP sends and what it expects. With the knowledge of these "expect-send" pairs I set up a chat script (chat controls the modem and is driven by a set of expect-send strings in a config file) and use 'pon' to dial. Pon just starts up pppd which first runs chat with the proper config file (you can have more than one if you have more than one dialup account). Once chat terminates the modem is connected (or there was an error with the line, ISP or something) and pppd then proceeds with ppp authentication and packet transfering. Basically you need to use at least 2 programs to get a dial-up connection : a modem dialer (ie wvdial or chat) and a ppp connection program (pppd). Minicom is a great tool for determining how your ISP handles an incoming call, then after that it isn't really useful because (AFAIK) it isn't scriptable. HTH, -D
