Configuring Dial-up

[David Hart]

On Fri, Dec 09, 2005 at 10:41:10AM +0200, Bill Cairns wrote:
> 
> Thank you for your patience with a real Linux beginner. I still have a long way to go on the security aspects.
 
No problem.  I hope I haven't come across as arrogant or patronising.
It's easy to forget what it's like for a newcomer to Linux and at the
same time I don't want to talk down to anyone.

> I will be dedicating a large part of this weekend in trying to get my dial up connection to work the way I would like it to. At the moment I am stuck with the System -> Administration -> Networking applet because it is the only one that I can get to work. pppconfig and pon does indeed dial up but Firefox does not recognise the connection. Gnome-ppp does not see my modem at all. The need for a password is (at the moment) more of an irritation than a problem, but the speed of the connection is a real problem.

I think your problem with pppconfig is that the default route isn't
being set (as I think you mentioned elsewhere).  It's easy to check with
a 'route -n'.  Here's the output on my laptop:

 Kernel IP routing table
 Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
 192.168.98.0    0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth1
 0.0.0.0         192.168.98.1    0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth1

The last line is the default route.  0.0.0.0 means 'anywhere else',
192.168.98.1 is my ADSL router (the gateway) and the eth1 is my wireless
network card.

On a dial-up connection you should see something similar with the
gateway being the box at the ISP end of your PPP conection and the
Iface ppp0.

If you don't have a default just go through pppconfig again remembering
to select the defaultroute option and you should be away.

As for the speed when you go through the Network app I don't know.
You could try typing 'pppstats -w 1' into a terminal (you may need to
put sudo at the beginning of that) to check what sort of throughput
you are getting.

I've had a quick look through the archives again and I agree with
another poster that there isn't much available for dial-up in Ubuntu
(I seem to remember loads available in Debian/Gentoo - where's it
all gone?)

I only found two wrapper apps to go around pon/poff.  One bbppp I used
for a long time when fluxbox was my window manager, but it's not much
use with Gnome.  The other is gpppon which looks very basic but may do
the trick to avoid opening a terminal for pon/poff.

I've been looking for something to put back into the community (and
get my programming skills back up to speed) so (when I get myself back
into work, which takes priority at the moment) I may have a look at
doing something about it.

-- 
David Hart <ubuntu at tonix.org>