Re: ppp

[Ignatios Souvatzis <ignatios%cs.uni-bonn.de@localhost>]

   Date: 20 Jul 96 19:00:08 +0500
   From: jegill%galileo.mis.net@localhost (UNREGISTERED VERSION)

   Help!

   I am at the end of my rope.  I've read the networking and netbsd faq's and
   bought Unix unleashed, the BSd4.4 system managers manual, the bsd4.4
   programmers supplementary docs, and even the TCP/IP admin by Craig Hunt,
   and I can't figure it out.

   I had my bsd system set up to use kermit to dial my isp and then
   pppd to connect.  I never had any trouble, until I decided to reinstal

Then you were very fortunate; see below. You probably had told your
old modem to ignore DTR.

   my system from scratch.  Now pppd only gives me a time-out message,
   i.e timeout sending config-requests.

This indicates that the connection is dropped at the point pppd gets
started. This sounds pretty normal: when you close the last open file
descriptor attached to a terminal device, it normally toggles DTR,
which makes the modem hangup.

   Also, in kermit, when I try to connect, it won't echo my login name (it
   used to) and it drops characters from the welcome message of my provider.

This sounds like you don't tell the modem to obey incoming (to the
computer) handshaking, or some wire is missing, or you didn't tell the
tty interface to create handshaking. Check the crtscts settings or how
they are called in kermits status command, if you insist to use kermit.

   I've recompiled my kernel several times (making sure to use make clean) and
   nothing seems to help, although one time it actually worked, but not since.

I'd recommend that you actually read the pppd(8) and chat(8) man
pages, and make pppd call chat to do the dialling and logging
in. Thats the way pppd is intended to work.... this way there won't be
a time interval where no process has the tty opened, and the modem
will never get the impulse telling it to reinitialize (and drop the
connection).

        -is