[IOML] A Question!!

[Dylan Smith]

On Thu, 10 Jun 2004, Simon Slaytor wrote:
Hi,

> To get the system to demand dial I've used wvdial (v1.5.3) as a chat
> replacement with pppd (v2.4.1).

I did more or less exactly this with RH 8 some time ago, except I took the
lazy bastard's route and just used the redhat-config-network GUI tool as
it had been years since I'd last set up a dialup connection of any sort. I
never had a problem with it - it just worked. You might want to try the
GUI tool and see if it sets pppd/wvdial any differently to the way you've
done it.

I have had some weirdness with wvdial before - for some reason with a 3com
USB ISDN TA (an ACM device, so it just uses the standard /dev/ttyacm
stuff), wvdial would never see the CONNECT string (and I'm pretty sure I
was getting it). In this case, I just modified the wvdial source to look
for any data and try and get a ppp connection out of it :-)

Due to the difference in time on your log entries, I'd hazard a guess that
pppd is starting wvdial, and wvdial is doing *something* - if wvdial
doesn't have any verbose logging options you might be reduced to
scattering debug printf() calls over the code to find out where it's
going. If wvdial is failing in the way it did with my 3com CONNECT string
problem, you can see it in the syslog so I doubt you're running into that.
Other issues I've had is with Eicon Diva ISDN TA cards - they changed the
firmware a while back which broke the kernel driver - I managed to fix it
myself but it continued to break in subtle and annoying manners until the
real Diva driver maintainer got a fix in the kernel, so if you have
another TA floating around it's always worth trying it to see if it
perhaps is subtle breakage in the driver for whatever TA you're using
(assuming it's not an ACM device).

Fortunately, we got shot of ISDN for that particular application and moved
to ADSL, which doesn't have half the hassle since it uses a router that
some other bugger has to maintain :-)
(For home use, I use the MT-supplied Stingray, works fine with Linux)