OK, I have some flavor of RH9; last I USED this box was Jan 1st '04, it had been doing RHN updates till then. I bought a Mac Powerbook that day, and haven't mussed with it since (i'm getting lazy...). Running 2.4.20-20.9 kernel. My RHN account/machine was deactivated, I let it lapse....oh well.

So I know this girl, she needs a pc, her *nasty* Win95 box is virus-infested, dying, underpowered.... I haul my old RH9 box out of the closet to just GIVE her, buy a cheap isp account (aaahawk --works good, mostly) get the thing dialing the ISP w/ my USR 56K (3040) external modem (advanced at string settings at&f1X3 works good...).

All is fine and well UNTIL I get a BUSY signal at the isp, which frankly i'd never GOTTEN before (now that i have to think about it --ah, times have changed...).

Several things happen; it redials. Hmm...I didn't ask it to....I hit deactivate . Network Device control just LOCKs, as in I can CLICK deactivate but it doesn't. It just SITS there in active mode....

OK, I turn off the modem, and essentially have to restart X to recover control of the Network Device Control (NDC) application. Yuk. Girl isn't going to like THAT. I try a few more times; now it doesnt auto-redial (can't find any settings in -configure- that would make it autodial, much less anything to turn OFF. Why it STOPPED autodialing at that moment is a mystery). At some point Network Device Control CRASHES (no, I didn't write the info down -sob!) and I figure i'll just REMOVE all the network devices (modem, eth0) and sort of start from scratch.

OK, upon reboot, NOW the NDC has no network devices and **won't let me ADD any**. Its T.U. completely....

Several questions:

does NDC have issues w/ busy signals? Was there something I could have done that would have made it gracefully handle busy signals? Can't find any at codes for the USR external for that

Anyway, now that NDC is for all intents and purposes DEAD, how do I get it BACK? Is there an rpm to reinstall? I'm smelling slippery slope here...

Are there BETTER Linux dialers out there? Distros (Mandrake, Suse --i'll pay the $$, but it'd be handy to know first what WORKS --RH sure doesn't!...) that have more robust dialers? I want it as easy as possible for this girl. I had configured a shortcut to the desktop (she's completely non-technical, but can follow simple instructions...) and got her to manually dial. The 'BUSY' problem really put a crimp on things; and w/ NDC DEAD, well....what good it the box? Do I need to re-install? At that point i'd look at other distros....

Deeper musings: i'm sort of turned off to RH these days, what w/ Fedora, plans, all the changes...I know this is a personal problem, but it makes me ask: would Mandrake be a better distro to shove in front of a non-technical sort? Better, more robust, easier to recover-on-busy dialer is the BIG thing....suse?

looking for ideas/directions/paths..

regards, and thanks,

vinylone

Kppp is a very good analog dialer. Comes with KDE networking. I'm guessing you don't have that installed. Nevertheless, you might want to consider that if this happens on kppp, that you have a pc hardware problem or a telco line problem.

What an AHA! moment. I *wonder* if i'd intalled Kde when I set this box up. I was sorta brought up on Gnome, so I went with Gnome. It was force of habit, I have no religeous zeal one way or the other.....I'll give kppp a whirl; it HAS to be better than the NDC that is all there is in Gnome....

I suppose i SHOULD say whereas kudzu found the modem correctly, as a USR 3040 external, Gnome found it as a generic modem. On the surface this hasn't been an issue (unless THIS is the issue), once I got the X3 part of the init string stuffed into at&f1X3 I had no more problems w/ the fast busy from the telco's message-waiting service...

Thank you VERY much for your time.

If I may ask, what distro do you use?

regards,

Vinylone

I use Suse Linux 9.1 Professional. Bought it actually, just because it was well tested. I use apt4rpm for package management with a synaptic frontend. I tend to like fluxbox or iceWM for a GUI, but am stuck on KDE until I can reprogram some of the menu's in my preferred GUI. And that's about it.

Thank you very much for sharing your experience. I reeled in Mandrake yesterday, haven't got it installed yet (I mistakenly burned cd1 as 'bootable', and i've been infomed I shouldn't have, so at work -20 mb pipe- i'll reel it in again), if it doesn't work out suse is my next choice....ya gotta love suse, gutsy bunch (the Novell angle...)

warm regards,

vinylone