Modem Problems

[neil woolford]

On Mon, 2005-12-05 at 12:12 +0200, Bill Cairns wrote:


> 
> I am playing with Ubuntu at home on a fairly (1999) old Dell machine. This is my first attempt at Linux. On Saturday I bought an external (Microcom DeskPorte Home) serial port modem. To my surprise I was able to install it and get it working without any great difficulties: I used the standard System > Administration > Networking.
> 
> But while it is working, it is not working very well:
> 
> The only way I can find of getting the modem to connect is by following the System > Administration > Networking route. Surely I should be able to connect without root privileges? Surely I should be able to create an icon that says "Connect to Internet"? 

> Surely, if I tell Firefox to connect to an URL, it should have some way of initiating the connection and not just give me the informative message "www.x.y could not be found. Please check the name and try again"? 

That's almost certainly a DNS (Domain Name Server) lookup problem.

> 
> On a Debian site I read of the command pon and got temporarily excited as that seemed to be what I was looking for. But when I type pon (or sudo pon) I get:
> 
> /usr/sbin/pppd: In file /etc/ppp/peers/provider: unrecognized option '/dev/modem'
> 
> which is not as helpful as I was hoping. (poff works fine).

It's a while since I did any serious dialup, but you probably need to
set a symbolic link between /dev/modem and your real modem device, or
edit the configuration (almost certainly ..../peers/provider) with the
real modem device name.  However, this gets messy fairly fast, as you
have probably already discovered...

> 
> The same helpful Debian article talks of editing the file /etc/ppp/peers/provider. I did this (setting "modem" to "ttyS0") but poor old pon tried and tried and tried to connect but achieved nothing. At least it did not give me that error message any more. I thought that I could reboot to get it to stop, but it started again as soon as the boot was complete. That will teach me to use Windows solutions on Linux.
> 
> I am sure that what I want to do is nothing extraordinary. In fact I am sure they can be done if I knew what how to do them:
> 
> I want to be able to connect to my service provider by clicking on an icon (or some similar convenient technique). This should not require root privileges.

The best solution I found was to use gnome-ppp, which is in the universe
repository.  This program allows easy setup of many of the subtle
settings for dialup, including DNS.  It installs as a program, but you
can then drag the menu item to the top panel to make a short cut that is
easy to find and use.

> 
> When Firefox or another program wants to connect, it should happen automatically. It would be nice if it asked me first.
> 
> Connections should time out and disconnect if there is no activity after a certain time.

Sorry, no ideas for that, though I'm sure it can be done.  (My dialup
was flat rate per month.)

Neil
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20051205/31d2ae3c/attachment.sig>