[SWLUG] Modems

[justin at discordia.org.uk]

On 19 Apr, Rhys Sage wrote:
> Having now got my network up and running (today I plugged Zeus (SME
> Aphrodite (NT4) and Persius (Win 98) into the hub for the first time and
> switched them all on), 
I presume that you can now ping to/from all of the machines (any
personal firewalling setups permitting)

> it seems to me that the next logical extension
> be to put a modem onto Zeus and to take the modem off Persius. Now, my
 big question is: somebody advised me to use an external modem. I quite
 like an internal modem. Which is better? More to the point, will Linux
 handle any modem or are there specific modems to use? 

Any vaguely new PCI modem will be a winmodem of one kind or another,
ie it requires the PC to do some of the work in software, and of course
the supplied software is for windows only.

There are certain winmodem chips which have drivers under linux,
check a site like http://www.linmodems.org and
http://www.idir.net/~gromitkc/winmodem.html  which contains an
exhaustive list of every known card and chipset and if they are
supported.

An external modem is recommend because although they are a little bit
more expensive, they are REAL modems, and do not require any form of
special driver, nor any minimum level of cpu to run.

> Also, how on earth do I tell a modem to dial and to hang up,
> from Persius or Aphrodite?
There is a large number of ways of doing this, possibly the most
convenient would be to setup auto dialling, such that the machine with
the modem would dial up the internet whenever any of the computers on
your network tried to access an IP address that is not on your LAN (and
thus would be on the internet)

Hopefully the linux distribution you are using has a config tool to set
this up for you.  redhat istr shipped with a tool called rp3, but every
distrbition has their own favoured choice.