On 24 Feb 2003, Greg Troxel wrote:

>   "James K. Lowden" <jklowden@schemamania.org> writes:
>   > Whenever I've seen "Serial link is not 8-bit clean", it's been because the
>   > provider wasn't set up to do PAP, but was expecting a plaintext login.
>
> I think I've also seen this error when the login (with
> username/password) seems to work, but then the script that is run from
> /etc/master.passwd has e.g. a bad interpreter, causing the login
> session to end, hanging up the phone.  Then the local pppd is just
> talking to the modem.  Usually I get more info than this, though:
>
> Feb 21 09:12:37 foo chat[398]: send (??????)
> Feb 21 09:12:37 foo pppd[396]: Serial connection established.
> Feb 21 09:12:37 foo pppd[396]: Using interface ppp0
> Feb 21 09:12:37 foo pppd[396]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/modem
> Feb 21 09:13:08 foo pppd[396]: LCP: timeout sending Config-Requests
> Feb 21 09:13:08 foo pppd[396]: Connection terminated.
> Feb 21 09:13:08 foo pppd[396]: Serial link is not 8-bit clean:
> Feb 21 09:13:08 foo pppd[396]: All received characters had bit 7 set to 0

The most usual reason for this error, by the way, is that the chat
script fails to end abruptly on receiving CONNECT, as it almost
certainly should. Logging into a shell account, then trying to
negotiate ppp never works. Some services now let you use a different
account (Psomething) for ppp, but you still have to use PAP or CHAP,
so why bother logging in at all?

If that's not it, I'm sure I posted a reference to a PPP FAQ very
recently. It should be easy to find in the archives.

>   Perry writes:
>   That isn't necessarily so. That is to say, I know of remotes that will
>   do prompted logins and ALSO normal PPP handshakes, so dialing in by
>   hand doesn't tell you anything.
>
> Any clues/pointers on how to make NetBSD do this?

Check out "mgetty". I'm currently working on updating the package, but
the current package version works fine, too.

Frederick