Re: [tlug] pppd weirdness

[ccd <ccd@example.com>]

Jonathan Byrne wrote:
> Got a little ppp problem here (yes, how low the mighty have fallen; during my whole five years as a Linux user, I never had to use a modem with it b/c I always had either a leased line or fixed-ip
> dial with an ISDN router in front of my home net; now here I sit with nothing  but a USR V-Everything Courier between me and connectivity oblivion) that  googling has not helped me with at all so far.
 >
> The system: RH 7.3, which uses wvdial and ppp-watch to approximate the dialup behavior familiar
> to users of a certain other  OS.

I've had very good results using Gnome and KDE's builtin PPP programs 
(KDE's is "kppp"). A few years ago, for the command-line stylee, there 
was a great resource on (I think it was) linuxos.org that would create 
custom PPP scripts for you. In any case, I'm not terribly fond of things 
that "do things for me"... unless it's basic math.

> About a week ago, I used the RH Internet connection config wizard to set up connections to the
> two ISPs that we have access to here in Vietnam.  That part worked flawlessly, and I could connect to
> both.  The only fly in the ointment was that if the lines were all busy, the connection didn't go through,
> whatever (all not unusual here), it would just keep on redialing immediately, despite the fact that it was set for non-persistent connections.  I still haven't found a way to turn that off.  But I digress.
> 
> Since a couple days ago, it just stopped working.  I had changed nothing in the config at all.  The only thing possibly relevant is (because the deactivate button is useless to make it stop dialing) is that to make it quite dialing  because it was late and I wanted to go to bed, I had to just kill off the process(es), but no  file I could find had a time stamp from that day, so I'm stumped on that, too.

Did you check for files ".*" as well? A la vim's swap files. I'm not 
terribly familiar with RH's methods, perhaps that's how they work.

> I can talk to the modem just fine using minicom, so it's not a modem or serial port problem.  A syslog tail indicates that pppd is being started on /dev/ttyS1 when I try to bring up a connection, but it never communicates with the modem.  No blinkenlights whatsoever.  Bypassing the  wvdial part and trying to bring up ppp0 directly gets the same situation.  It just sits there until I manually kill it, at which time it at least tells me pppd ended with error 35 (but like an MS error, I have yet to find what that means, either).
> 
> Deleting the connection profiles and redoing them also resulted in no change.   Anybody been there/done that, had a problem like this? 
> 
The closest thing I had was that time that a thunderstorm killed my 33.6 
;) Try opening the case and moving the modem up or down a slot. You have 
rebooted the machine, haven't you? I find that powering down and walking 
away for beer/chess/food solves 90% of my problems, but that's me.

hope that's some amount of help.
-christian
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