Set up dial up with no dial tone

[Neil Woolford]

On Sat, 2005-10-01 at 06:49 +0930, squareyes wrote:
> Hi all,
> am going to try to set up a dial up connection for a friend
> who has a pre-paid account. When he picks up phone he gets a recorded 
> message
> to enter his account number, no dial tone exists.
> Will the lack of dial tone cause problems, and if so how do I work 
> around it??
> He has a Lucent modem.
> Thanks in advance,
> Take Care
> Winton
> 
> 
My experience (in the UK) has been that modems normally require a dial
tone by default, even the slightly non-standard interrupted dial tone
that you get when you have call waiting or voicemail active isn't
recognised by the modem and it won't dial out.  So I think you will have
a problem with your friend's setup.  But it can be solved.

I assume that what you need is to dial his access code and then the
ISP's number, regardless of the absence of a standard dial tone.  There
is an AT command that can be sent to the modem during initialisation to
make it dial without waiting for dial tone;  that code is ATX3.

If I recall correctly (I no longer use dialup so this is from memory and
what is left in my system files) the command can be issued
in /etc/chatscripts/ppp0.  Mine looks as follows:

neil at ubuntu:/etc/chatscripts $ cat ppp0

TIMEOUT 60
ABORT ERROR
ABORT BUSY
ABORT VOICE
ABORT "NO CARRIER"
ABORT "NO DIALTONE"
ABORT "NO DIAL TONE"
ABORT "NO ANSWER"

"" "ATX3L2"
"" "AT&FH0L2"
OK-AT-OK "ATDT147008089916080"
TIMEOUT 75
CONNECT

This isn't perfect, the "" "ATX3....... line was edited from ...ATZ...
which is the standard modem setup string.  The syntax is fiddly, and I'm
no expert :(  But it worked for me.

Now the best way to do the job!

Rather than getting down and dirty with the configuration files
yourself, you may find that the dialing utility GnomePPP ideal as it
includes an option for turning wait for dialtone on or off.  This worked
for me when setting up a friend's machine recently.  I installed it and
then made a shortcut in the top panel.  GnomePPP is *much* more
configurable than the Modem Monitor panel applet.

Neil