Hi, First, apologies for the cross-posting; I'm not sure which list this plea belongs on.
I finally took the plunge last weekend and made my switch to Progeny Debian from Mandrake 7.2. I'm not going to talk about Progeny's (horrible) installer in this message. Suffice to say I got Progeny installed, at the cost of losing my windows and Madrake partitions. After I got it installed, and got my non-standard modem IRQ configured with setserial, I got to work configuring my internet connection. I've done this before on Mandrake, so I figured it would take 5 minutes. Wrong. The following narrative is somewhat abridged, but it captures the essentials: I get my /etc/ppp/peers/provider and /etc/chatscripts/provider configured. I try to dial in. The modem is *amazingly* slow to respond. But it dials, and then sloooowly the ISP's prompts appear. Now, before, I had been dialing up and then immediately authenticating with PAP; I hadn't even known that the ISP's system would give a login prompt if a ppp session was not immediately started. Hoever, the default chatscript I modified had the "ogin:"/"sword:" expect/reply pairs in it, and I had went ahead and used them. Turns out the ISP /does/ give login prompts, albeit verrrry slowly. Thinking nothing of it, I watched the prompts go by in my syslog, and then watched pppd hang up as some timeout was reached. After awhile I got various timeouts tweaked so that neither chat nor pppd would timeout while waiting for a response. Once I even managed to get as far as seeing the PPP data begin to stream over; but no matter what I did, pppd was unable to negotiate a connection. I kept getting LCP response timeouts; or simple an "alarm" message in pppd's log and then an exit. I tried changing the lcp timeout and lcp-max-configure setting, to no avail. At some point a light bulb turned on and I realized "Hey! I never had to use a chat script to enter login and password before! I was using PAP!" So I modified the chat script to only go as far as dialing and waiting for a connection; made sure the "user" option was in my 'provider' file; and verified all the right info was in pap-secrets. No deal. pppd reported "response not 8-bit clean" or somesuch. After searching around from my work internet connection, I discovered that this meant that the ISP was not switching over to ppp. "Huh" I thought. "They must have changed their login procedure at the exact same time I decided to upgrade. I guess now they require a manual login". There followed a period of my tweaking every possible ppp setting; trying various different changes in my chat script; trying other dialup configuration programs, such as pppconfig and kppp. Nothing. I couldn't just switch back to Mandrake or Windows to see if /their/ connections still worked, because Progeny's installer had summarily erased those partitions from my boot record. Finally, this morning, I created a new partition and reinstalled Mandrake 7.2. I configured kppp with my usual setup; with PAP authentication. I hit "Connect" and within seconds, I was connected on the first try. No long pauses; no LCP errors; no timeouts. So, I'm stumped. I can't figure out what's different. It almost seems like my ISP acts differently depending on which distro I use. Absurd, I know. The one suspicious thing all along has been the fact that my modem has been strangely slow in all it's responses to AT commands when used under Debian. It's a Motorola VoiceSURFR 56k, not a winmodem. I guess what I'm saying is: HELP!!! Does anyone have any idea what's different about Progeny/Debian that makes me unable to use my modem to get online? I *really* want to switch to Debian; but until I can get this resolved that's not going to happen. Thanks, -Avdi Grimm
