Solved!

Dave said the dealy was due to DNS timing out. And that was it.
I got the ping delay to go away by moving all the DNS related stuff 
out of /etc/ppp/options and into /etc/ppp/peers/att.chat (as Bruce
had said was possible to do in an earlier response). Then, which may
not have been necessary (I'll try commenting it out later) I added
"rm /etc/ppp/resolve.conf" (sans quotes) to the end of my script for
/etc/ppp/ppp-down.

As soon as I did those two things, the 1-min ping delay disappeared
from the ppp-connection. Now I will go back and attack the authentication
problem anew.

Thanks,

Gan


On Sunday 30 September 2001 19:30, you wrote:
> On Sun, 30 Sep 2001, Gan Uesli Starling wrote:
> > This way I indeed got a connection. And indeed, it did seem to
> > reveal another problem. There is a horrendous delay in this
> > connection: on the order of a minute and a half.
> >
> > Sep 30 15:20:45 thinkpad chat[2369]: abort on (NO DAILTONE)
>
> That should still be DIALTONE, btw :)
>
> > thinkpad# ping -c 3 192.168.1.100
> > PING 192.168.1.100 (192.168.1.100): 56 data bytes
> > 64 bytes from 192.168.1.100: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=142.956 ms
> > 64 bytes from 192.168.1.100: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=106.142 ms
> > 64 bytes from 192.168.1.100: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=104.582 ms
>
> That's not an unusual delay... 100ms is actually quite good for a modem
> connection.
>
> > ...But 1 minute and some 30 seconds passed between my entring
> > the PING command and the appearance of the line which said...
> > "PING 192.168.1.100 (192.168.1.100): 56 data bytes" which is not
> > right at all.
>
> That's not the delay on the connection, that's the DNS resolution timing
> out. By default, ping will try to map the IP address to a name... unless
> you have a nameserver set up to handle the IP-to-name mappings for the
> 192.168.1.* block, the request will go out to never never land. Ping
> eventually gives up and starts the pinging. If you do "ping -n
> 192.168.1.100", you won't see the delay.
>
> > I suspect that this is why, when I tried to login via PAP I got a
> > nastygram on the ThinkPad that said "Peer refused to authenticate".
> > I suspect that authentication timed out.
>
> That's unrelated... that means the tower's PPP config is set to not do
> authentication. Make sure you don't have "noauth" in its pppd options
> file, and you do have an entry for the Thinkpad in its pap-secrets file.