tlug: Hitting yourself on the head with a hammer

[Rex Walters <rex@example.com>]

I've just spent the last two or three months (an hour or so at a time, here and
there) trying to debug an ISDN dialup problem I've been having under RH
5.0.

Since the problem ended up being that I wasn't having a problem (other
than sheer stupidity) I thought I'd post my story in the hopes that it
prevents someone else from going through the same pain.

In a nutshell, remember the obvious:  You'll never see an ASCII login
prompt if you use Synch-64 ISDN to your ISP and they use PAP to
authenticate.

You see, I'd been a Slackware user for quite a while, and had debugged
many generations of PPP to various ISPs over the years.  My modus
operandi has always been to fire up minicom or something similar,
dial up the ISP with ATDT, perform the login session (copying all the
prompts), and verify you see garbage characters scrolling off your
screen when PPP fires up on the remote end.

Well, I had ISDN to my ISP working from Win95 and from my old slackware
partition for quite a while.  When I installed RH 5.0 suddenly I could
no longer connect.

Whenever I tried the minicom trick, I'd see the "CONNECT" message and
then nothing else.  No login prompt!  Eventually the ISP would get tired
of me sitting there and would drop the connection.  Bizzarre!
Inconceivable!  Com between the PC and the TA (a NEC Aterm IT55) was
fine since AT commands worked.  The remote end was okay since I could
connect with Win95 or slackware.

[As you've probably noticed, this is correct behavior: after the connect
I just needed to quit minicom without resetting the modem/TA, add an
entry to /etc/ppp/pap-secrets and fire up pppd.  It never occured to me
to try this without getting a login prompt.  Sigh.  Old dogs, new
tricks.]

I spent oodles of time trying to figure out why I could occasionally get
an ASYNC connection with login prompt to some of the dial-in numbers,
but only at 38400 and then very flakey/unreliable.  The fact that I
*did* get a login when using ASYNC (AT$N1=0) *really* confused me.

Finally after tearing apart Win95 (my slackware partition got trashed
after the RH 5 upgrade) I realized that the same thing happened there.
I finally thought to just try firing up pppd after the CONNECT, saw the
PAP negotion messages (the debug option to pppd is A Good Thing),
grabbed the handles on either side of my monitor, and bashed my head
into the screen.

Anyway, everything's fine now.  Kppp under KDE is way cool -- it even
sets my host name properly by doing a reverse name lookup on my
dynamically assigned IP address.  Highly recommended.

*Finally* I can quit booting Win95 just to read my office mail from home
(god that was disgusting -- Win95 telnet just sucks).  I was going
berserk.

Cheers,
-- 
Rex
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