[SWLUG] Pings are looking up

[Rhys Sage]

Message: 2
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2003 17:31:10 +0100 (BST)
From: justin at discordia.org.uk
Subject: Re: [SWLUG] Modems

>I presume that you can now ping to/from all of the machines (any
>personal firewalling setups permitting)

Yes. Pings now work with names as well as numbers. Network Neighbourhood on
Aphrodite shows Aphrodite and Zeus (but not Persius). Network Neighbourhood
on Persius shows Persius and Zeus but not Aphrodite. I'm a little puzzled
about why Persius and Aphrodite aren't visible. Maybe it's got something to
do with my settings on SME Linux. I'll have to try to set up an I-Bay. At
the moment I've got 2 gig of data just stuffed into the admin files on Zeus.

>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.

I have heard a lot of talk of seriel modems. Do I need a seriel modem? Does
it need an external power source? How about USB modems - do they exist and
would they work under SME Linux?

>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)

Ah. Now that would be useful but not secure. I'd rather have to call a
dialling program and tell it to dial my ISP. That way, I'd know exactly when
i'd be online and should also be able to tell it to get offline. With
Windows, I can do this fairly easily using the RAS library. In fact, on my
website there's sample code that uses RASEnumConnections and the code allows
people to force an internal modem to hang up. I'm not sure how I'd achieve
the same under Linux (not that I have Kylix anyway).

>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.

I'll have to hunt around. At the moment I'm stuck with accessing solely via
Admin if I contact Zeus from Persius. I really need to get in as root. I'll
have to find out a way of doing that.
Yours,

Rhys