On Fri, 1 May 1998, Coltman Timothy wrote:

> I'm using RiscBSD 1.3 Alpha (with the 1.3.1 comp set (well, most of it 
> anyway), on a 42mb SA-110. At the end of June, I leave university (sob) 
> and will have to do without a nice high-speed connection to the Internet.

If I were you I'd upgrade the system to the latest version before you
leave uni ;)
 
> I intend to get connected to the net again ASAP from my RiscPC. I could 
> use something like ANT's internet suite or the Acorn stuff but how easy 
> is it to get connected using RiscBSD? Obviously you'll need an account at 
> an ISP, internet software and the like (such as KDE), but what then? Or 
> is it so complicated, it's not worth it?

If you get a standard dial up account, using ppp as the protocol you can
use pppd to do all the dialing and PAP/CHAP authentication, after that all
the standard telnet, ftp etc work.  I think you can use slip as well
somehow, although I don't know as my isp uses ppp.  You could even setup
sup to keep your system uptodate (I did this during the hols).  Someone
has a page with the some files that setup the details for pppd, the man
page is fairly detailed, and gives a few examples.  One thing you do need
to do before using sup (if you decide to) is set the hostname to the same
as your isp's modem one.  (unless you get a fixed ip address, which I
think demon do)

Another method is to use acornnet, this worked well enough for me to
pickup email and newsgroups (ie I didn't bother with email and news with
unix)  However web browsing with acornnet is with Arcweb, so it isn't that
uptodate, I think that some version of mozilla (netscape) works for
NetBSD.

I think you need a kernel that includes the pppd (I think this is in the
standard RISCPC ones...

If you want to test the communication with the modem then kpppd from
kdenetwork has a section for doing this, but takes some work to get
working (unless the makefile in the pkgsrc tree does the trick).

You will probably get the odd message on the console about overflows, but
this is fairly normal.

Cheers,
Chris

PS sorry this message is a bit of mix, I just kept remember random
things...