Connecting to Internet - again

[David Hart]

On Tue, Dec 13, 2005 at 09:51:26AM +0200, Bill Cairns wrote:
> 
> My sincere thanks for the trouble that so many, especially David, have taken 
> to help me get connected. I now have two items on my desktop ("Connect" 
> and "Disconnect" which use "pon" and "poff") which connect me to my service
> provider (and disconnect me again) easily and without any need for passwords.

Glad you got it going.
 
> David, I am sorry but I must be awful slow at this Ubuntu security. I can
> create a new user but, unless I give that user administrative privileges,  I 
> cannot use the System > Administration > Network applet to connect to the 
> network. I simply get the diagnostic that administration privileges are required 
> (or words to that effect). Of course, if I do give the user administration privileges, 
> it does work but then that user has full rights to do anything they want. This is the 
> "security hole" that I was afraid of. However, this is fairly academic as the pon and
>  poff method works perfectly.

No, you're right, it is a security risk to have to give full admin
privs just for dialup but, as I've said elsewhere, that applet does
all your networking which ordinary users shouldn't be messing with.
I had assumed (wrongly) that there were several working alternatives
in the repository, which would easily avoid the need for that.

[snip]
> My only disappointment if that Gnome-ppp simply does not recognise my
> modem. I have no idea why.

I tried gnome-ppp over the weekend and it didn't detect my modem
either.  As it's a front end to wvdial I ran that from the command
line.

'wvdialconf /etc/wvdial.conf' correctly found my modem.  'wvdial'
dialed out, said it had found the carrier, then immediately lost it
again but never the less went on to get a 'login:' prompt and just
sat there.  All the time I was looking at syslog (where I understand
its supposed to write something) but I found nothing (nor anything
else under /var/log).

It's odd, I don't recall wvdial ever working for me (and I've tried it
on different hardware several times over the years), yet wvdial is in
'main' so I would've thought it works for someone.

Can anyone report having joy with this supposedly simple interface
to pppd or shed any light on what I might be doing wrong?

-- 
David Hart <ubuntu at tonix.org>