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Installed mandrake 9.1 lastnight. I used to option to setup my internet dial up connection at the last part of the installation. My internet connection, ppp0 works fine. I access it using the ifup ppp0 command as root. I need to add a second dial up connection to a different ISP. I started linuxconf, clicked on the Networking button, then clicked on the PPP / SLIP / PLIP button to create a new connection. A window opened showing my current internet connection, ppp0 in the list. I clicked on the ADD button to add a new connection, entered the new username, password, phone number and selected the same device, /dev/modem, as my other connection - ppp0 uses. I saved the connection which shows up in the list as ppp1. When I try to use the connection with the ifup ppp1 command as root, it immediately fails with ERROR 8. It never even attempts to dial or even access the modem. I have only one modem, an external, but it doesn't seem to be a modem problem anyway. Is there something else I need to do to get this connection working ? Can I create the connection manually some other way ? does ppp0 mean the first conneciton, or does that have something to do with a device number ? I'm a little green setting up multi ppp connections on linux. BTW - Both connections work under windoze. Thanks in advance for any help
I don't have a wvdial* anything on my system. I noticed one thing now that I hadn't seen before; on the communications tab of the ppp1 connection, the phone number I want to dial is on the "modem dial command" string line right behind ATDT instead of being on the Phone Number string line. When I moved it to the right place and saved it, it went right back to the modem dial command line again. It won't stay in the right place. The number I'm dialing contians commas for pausing then an extension number, sort of like this...
18005551234,,,,567
Is using commas for a pause illegal on ppp connections or do I need to set this up a different way ?
The commas are legal. I have never used them but I understand that they are used to pause the dialing sequence. So I understand your phone number to mean: call the ISP, wait a length of time to give the ISP time to answer, then dial an extension. There may be a timing problem in this sequence.
Looking at my reference for the Standard AT Command Set I find several ways to vary the timing.
1. You can vary the number of commas.
2. You can change the length of time that each comma represents by the Sxn command which sets the time value to n. Sx? displays the current time value.
3. / means pause 0.125 seconds
Or you can get rid of the commas and use the ; command
; means "Dial and remain in command mode after connection". After the ; then dial the extension.
I did some experimenting with the commas in the phone number but never got it to dial. I looked at the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ppp1 and at the top it had "DEVICE=ppp1" I didn't realize 'ppp1' or 'ppp0' were considered devices, or are they ? Since I only have one modem and one phone line attached to my computer I thought this might be the problem, so I edited the file and changed the top line to read "DEVICE=ppp0" and left the rest of the file like it was. What happens now when I do an "ifup ppp1" it dials out and connects, but it's dialing the number in the ppp0 connection and using the login information from ppp0 as well. Is it possible that you can only have one ppp connection per modem ? I only have one modem and it sure doesn't want to work with anything that isn't named ppp0. BTW, I'm using mandrake 9.1 and Blackbox window manager. I looked at KDE because there use to be a kppp setup but I can't find it anywhere in the KDE 3.1
I did some more experimenting and found that I can create any connection, as long as it is ppp0 it works, if it is ppp1 or anything higher, it doesn't work. I only have one modem attached to my computer so I can only have one ppp connection at a time.
What I am trying to accomplish here is comparable to this; if I were using a windows computer that had only one modem attached, and I needed to create several different dial up networking connections that dialed out to different places, one to my internet connection, one to my work computer, one to my wifes work computer. I could create as many dial-up networking connections as I wanted and they would all work., one at a time ofcourse since I have only one modem to dial out with, but they would be ready to use on demand. All of them would be configured to use the same modem.
You definitely can have more than one internet connection. I have done it using the wvdial control files. I am not familiar with
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ppp1 so somebody else will have to tell you how to configure it to use two different connections.
I did google on /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ppp1 and got some possible sites for you to try. Use google. Here's a possible help.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Looking at the question about whether ppp0 and ppp1 are devices: In Linux
everything is a device. It is common practice to ask to use a kernel service
routine by addressing a device in the /dev directory. You read/write to a
device but in reality you are passing information from and to a kernel
service program.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
This is just me turning your problem over in my mind.
If you want to have two different internet connections going at the same time I think that you would need to use ppp0 for the first and ppp1 for the second.
If you had two possible internet connections and only one modem you could do in the ppp0-ppp1 way. Or you could do it by always using ppp0 and have your service routine (kppp?) pass ppp0 different phone numbers, login ids, and passwords for the two connections.
I think that Mandrake is using Dial on Demand to set up your internet
connection. This program is automatically called whenever you start a program, such as Mozilla, which uses the internet. I doubt that starting DoD
automagically provides you with a way to specify which of several ISPs you
will dial this time.
I think that you should switch to kppp which does allow multiple ISPs. You must start kppp every time you use it. You can set up different desktop icons which start kppp connections to different ISPs. Here is a link to instructions to how to set up kppp.
I know a lot of people are using kppp to connect. I don't think kppp is installed on my system, or atleast I can't find it in my KDE. I remember seeing it in older versions of kde. Even looking under packages to install, there's no kppp. Maybe it's no longer included on this latest release, or maybe I just don't know how to access it, or maybe it's called something else now, I don't know, but would sure like to give it a try. I'm using Mandrake 9.1 with KDE 3.1. I usually use Blackbox window manager but don't mind using kde if necessary to use kppp........
Although I generally use Gnome, I use kppp to dial-up as it does support multiple accounts and is very easy to reconfigure.
When I did a Mandrake 9.1 installation last week, I installed KDE just to make sure that kppp was installed, and then got rid of all of the KDE apps which I don't use. There doesn't appear to be a menu entry for kppp - you can launch it from a terminal however or create a launcher icon for it. I use the modem lights applet, editing the properties to use kppp rather than pppon
Thanks Bob. How do you launch kppp in mandrake 9.1 from the command line, just "kppp" ? It doesn't work on my system at all, atleast not that way. Did you do an install 9.1 from scratch or upgrade an existing 9.0 installation ? Looking at the KDE.ORG site, the last version of KDE that shipped with kppp is 3.0 . When I installed Mandrake 9.1, it installed KDE 3.1 and kppp isn't ( that I can find ) installed in that version. It isn't listed as an available package in kdenetwork packages on the cdrom eitehr......Maybe I should see if the kppp from 3.0 would install on my 3.1....
Yes - in xterm I just enter 'kppp' or 'kppp -c Accountname' - although there does now seem to be a main menu entry for it - apparently after editing the menu some things do appear as if by magic.
To get Mandrake 9.1 i have done a complete fresh install - my first attempt was an upgrade from 9.0 to 9.1 and ended up as a bit of a mess because of old libraries compiled under the earlier kernel. A second attempt was to install 9.1. after re-formatting the root partition but keeping /home as it was - this wasn't very good either - I assume that the hidden config files were causing problems. The third attempt was to reformat root and /home and this has worked much better.
It appears that kppp is on the third CD:
Mandrake/RPMS3/kdenetwork-kppp-3.1-31mdk.i586.rpm , not with the other kdenetwork stuff.
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