Thanks for the advice so far, I'm sure I'm doing something really basic
wrong, here's the update (12 hours of trying further on)....
The messages from /var/log/messages
Dec 17 14:57:06 2nics pppd[752]: pppd 2.3.7 started by danb, uid 0
on the client
Dec 17 15:03:54 portal pppd[1549]: pppd 2.3.8 started by root, uid 0
on the server
That's it, no errors seem to appear at the tail of the messages.
pppd was started on both machines with
pppd crtscts lock asyncmap 0 defaultroute /dev/ttyS1 19200
(and various other combinations, including no hardware control)
Wondering what was happening on the serial cable I plugged in a box with
lights on, bringing up ppp on one machine brings up DSR and CTS, and on
the other DTR and RTS, which seems to make sense. TX and RX don't flash so
I assume nothing is actually going on over the cable. killing ppp resets
the associated lights too.
I've double checked the cable and null modem wiring by trying getty
through minicom again, both ways. Being adventurous I've upped the baud
rate to 19200 (is that better Lawson?!), but assume it should work at a
slower speed as long as both are using the same settings.
I've edited my /etc/hosts as suggested.
Now, I don't really understand how ppp works. Should it stream data over
the serial port as soon as it's invoked (as it does on the screen when
started with only "pppd" - "}}}}}$#}}}" etc)? Should I see ppp0 with
ifconfig as soon as one half is running, or does it have to establish a
connection first? I take it I don't have to edit anything through
linuxconf (PPP/SLIP/PLIP), that's just for using a modem? Should I be
setting up routing anywhere, where are the ip numbers and netmask coming
from?
hosts.deny is empty, hosts has 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.2 in with the
respective machine names.
I have got 2 nics in one machine and one in the other, I assume this
couldn't be confusing things. I have tried with then disabled too.
My null modem cable is made by swapping TD and RD, RTS and CTS, DSR and
DTR, SG runs to SG. As I mentioned, this is fine for logging on via a
terminal. In desperation I've tried 9 pin and 25 pin versions.
So, what next? I refuse to give up, it's become a challenge to overcome
now.
Thanks,
Dan.
re :
> > I'm trying to connect two Linux boxes together over a serial
> >connection
>
> > using ppp, the how-to does say "this is very simple"! Alas 2 days later
> I
> > still can't do it.
