Hi all,
I feel very happy to announce that after such a long period of trials and
R'ring TFM, I finally managed to "net-enable" my linux system.
Now I can log into my Roltanet as well as VSNL accounts without modifying
any files, simply by using the "call" option of pppd. Although the act
itself did not take more than 30mins this morning, it has behind it a
history of month long doc-searching. Now it seems so simple ... all I have
to do is create a /etc/ppp/peers/<isp> file and a corresponding
/etc/ppp/<isp-dialer> script and I can log on to any damn ISP! And of
course, there are the PAP/CHAP secrets that have to be supplied. Long live
the F Manual and long live the wonderful tradition of RTFM!
One important thing is the timeouts in the chat scripts ... I had been
working with a value of only 30 seconds, and predictably, the connection
would get killed since the modem was still trying to configure the
connection. There were no messages in the /var/log/messages about any
timeouts occuring - I realized that only when I inspected the timestamps of
the start and stop messages.
Also in the initial connection setup, the Roltanet server would agree to
PAP, but failed to authenticate my machine anyway ... but when I configured
CHAP, I was successfully authenticated. I don't know if this was a spurious
incident or whether the Roltanet server isn't really configured for PAP,
although its claimed to be to. Anyway, the default during negotiation was
CHAP+MD5, which now works very well.
Also, my mail setup is finally working properly. I am currently using qmail
to send mails and fetchmail+procmail to receive them. I now plan to
experiment with qmail-inject as the MDA.
All said and done, I must confess that this is not what I will be using for
most of my online time. That's because I have to share the Windoze system
in my home and rebooting frequently between OS's isn't exactly my idea of
fun. In fact that is the very reason why it took me so long to get things
right - I couldn't boot into Linux often enough to try things out!
Sameer.
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If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my axe.
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