Gurus of the council,
I just switched from FC1 to Debian Sarge. I (still) use a dial-up internet connection and have traditionally used kppp. However, for users to use kppp without the root password, I used sudo. Essentially, I added an application launcher at the bottom of the screen that issued the command:
sudo kppp
This worked fine in FC1, but now it is causing login problems in Sarge. It appears that when kppp is accessed via sudo, the .ICEauthority file is overwritten after closing the ppp connection. This overwriting is done at the root level and assigns a -rw------ permission to .ICEauthority (which is now owned by root in group 'root') , so the user cannot login since logging in requires access to .ICEauthority. I went in as root and chown'ed the .ICEauthority file to allow user access. This let the user ('other' permission) log in, but then when the user used sudo kppp, the file permissions were changed back to allow only root access.
As root, I chown'ed the file to give the user ownership, but this fix only worked until the user used sudo kppp and the file ownership and permissions changed back to root.
Also, following (oops) an earlier achived thread ("givng permission to kppp, process manager and etc"), I issued the command:
ln -sf /usr/sbin/kppp /usr/bin/kppp
Being somewhat of a novice, I'm not exactly sure what this did, but now trying "kppp" as root replies that there is no bash command kppp. Why does this cause a problem with the kppp command and how can I fix this to allow at least the root to be able to start kppp by typing "kppp"?

Thanks.
(Sorry for my lack of brevity)

System info:Debian 3.1 (Sarge), kernel 2.4-27-i386, P4 (celeron) 512 DDR RAM, nVidia GeForce2, Gnome 2.8, KDE 3.2.2

OK, well for those of you interested in how this turned out...
I decided that getting kppp to work for the users just wasn't worth the trouble because I found out how simple wvdial is. What I did was to set up an applet drawer for each user that contained two applet launchers. One I named 'Connect' that runs the command ''wvdial' and one named 'Hang up' that runs 'killall wvdial'. This is a nice no-hassle approach that is working out well. The one thing I'm not sure of is if kill-all wvdial is really the best way to hang up. See, I want the dial-up interface to be entirely graphical, since I have users (my girlfriend) who need to access the web, but are not comfortable with the command line.

Well, that didn't actually work out so well. My connection seems slow, and when I looked in the modem log it turns out it was operating at 9600 baud. My wvdial.conf file is set to 408600 baud. I tried changing it up and down and would always get an error message about not having ppp1. So I tried kppp again with the permissions set so sudo is not required. The user can load it, but when they try and connect, they get a 'can't find ppp1' error. My ppp connection should be through ppp0. Anybody have any ideas?