getting dialup networking to work on FC4

[akonstam at trinity.edu]

On Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 12:20:11AM +0930, Tim wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been having fun and games (not) getting dialup networking to work
> on Fedora Core 4.  I eventually got it working in what I consider a
> dodgy manner, and would like to know if there's a proper solution.
> 
> Initially, I've just used FC4 as terminals behind a Red Hat 9.0 server.
> It managed dial-up fine, the only messing around I remember having to do
> was putting "/sbin" in front of "ifup ppp0" in the modemlights utility.
> The "neat" program set up all the parameters needed for dialup quite
> fine.
> 
> I recently updated that Red Hat 9.0 box to Fedora Core 4, and dial-up
> wouldn't work.  I had to do all of the following:
> 
> I had to manually enter "ln -s /dev/ttyS0 /dev/modem" before I could
> dial up.  I had to put that into "/etc/rc.local" so I didn't have to
> type the command line after any reboots (the link disappears).
> 
>     (I gather there's a change in how /dev is going to be
>     handled, but some understandable documentation is in
>     need, and the GUI tool that created the modem settings
>     really should have done the job for me properly, in
>     the first place.)
> 
> So now I can, albeit awkwardly, dial up.  Onto the next step, making it
> easy to connect and disconnect.
> 
> The modemlights utility didn't work because it wanted to bring up a ppp0
> interface, and that's not how neat created the configuration (it named
> if after the name of my ISP, e.g. Optus).  So I renamed my entries in
> neat to ppp0 and ppp1, instead of my two ISPs.  But makes it hard to
> work out what's what in the list of connections in neat.  I hadn't tried
> changing the modemlights configuration to use my ISP name instead of
> ppp0, I'd done more experimenting than I wanted to at the time, and
> phone calls cost too much to make several just to try out all the
> permutations.
> 
> The next step was getting internet connection sharing through it to the
> rest of my LAN.  Try as I might I couldn't find any option in a GUI to
> enable it.  Previously I'd used some kernel configuration tweaking GUI
> to first start it, but I don't see anything similar.  I've also done hte
> same thing, previously, by entering the following in a command line,
> "echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward", but that doesn't survive a
> reboot, and I've also put that line into the "/etc/rc.local" post
> start-up script.
> 
> Is there some proper way to get /dev/modem set properly, differently
> from what I did?  And is there some other proper way to enable IP
> forwarding differently from what I did?  (Both using "/etc/rc.local".)
> 
> I don't mind doing it that way, though if there's a proper way, and this
> turns out to be a kludge, I'd rather do it properly.
> 
> The interaction between modemlights and neat needs a bit of sorting out.
> The way neat sets up configurations, by default, doesn't work with it.
> And modemlights probably isn't the only thing that expects the
> configuration to be called ppp0.
It is hard to where to start except to say the FC4 is not RH9.
First ip_forwarding id set up in the file /etc/sysctl.conf
Second, naming the ppp connection with the name of the ppp service is
pretty handy if you have more that one place you are dialing in using
ppp. I admit it is a problem since only one of these names can be
placed in modem-lights but that is the way it is. There is nothing
holy in the identification of a modem connection with ppp0. All that
does is determine the name of the ifcfg-xxx file that is associated
with ppp. Nothing at all requires the ppp connection to be called
ppp0.
Third, the identification of /dev/modem /dev/ttySx is more complicated
with udev. Just identify the serial port explicitly in the
configuration and no line in rc.local is needed.

I think that covers it. If not ask some more.
-- 


=======================================================================
Lake Erie died for your sins.
-------------------------------------------
Aaron Konstam
Computer Science
Trinity University
telephone: (210)-999-7484