Hello, I'm on Slack X and, after many troubles getting WinModem to work on it, I went through even more terrible things to connect. Eventualy I did that but with some weird things happening.

Anyway,

I tried and tried and tried ... to get the connection right with pppsetup script. It got me connected
(output: blah, blah remote IP: some IP1 , local IP : some IP2) however I couldn't ping anything, including my ISP. I was wondering, was it because I have dynamic IP and haven't had a clue what to feed to pppsetup script when it asked for IP address.

Sooo, abandoning this approach, eventhough using Gnome, I started kppp and got all those premission errors about pppd trying to open /etc/ppp/options. Well, already pissed, I changed all permissions of ppp and ppp/* to rwxrwxrwx. However it still had permision errors.

In a deed of utter despair I have eraised then /etc/ppp/options and replaced it with freshly created file owned just by ME! Now internet works (slowly though in the beginning, I'm still figuring out if anything is out of order) but I have used brute force and there is probably some more intelligent approach. Can anybody enlighten me?

If the configuration files in /etc/ppp are world readable it may be possible for someone to write some code, put it in a link in a web page so that if you clicked on it they could find out all they need to log on to your ISP as you. They could do all kinds of illegal things and you'd get the blame.
If you can write to /etc/ppp you might click on a link in a web page and execute some code which would rewrite your connection details so that it dialled up via some international premium rate number. They could make money and you'd pay the bill.
There are reasons why some things are done by root. As a user you should not have the power to screwup the whole system.
Do not take the power of root in vain

I can imagine... but what would be the right way. I tried giving read/xecution rights to a special group, however it didn't work (as i said kppp was complaining that it couldn't read the file from /etc/ppp. Now, I am asking for a right way to set up the dialup/net access for the ordinary user. BTW this is only a desktop machine (no network, no anything exotic).

I thought that this is a question more for newbie forum than slackware, since I had similar problems with some other distros, and an army of people transgressing from Win platforms with their winmodems and user friendly "push the icon and pray" habits probably find this stuff also difficult.

I tried for ages to get a WinModem working properly (initially on Slackware 9.1, latterly on a Knoppix install). The modem uses the 536ep chipset from Intel, which has a linux driver available from download from the Intel website.
The modem compiled alright, but however I tried I couldn't get a good connection. Sometimes I would get a few pages and then the whole thing would slow down. Most of the time I couldn't get any pages at all. I tried all manner of configurations and protocols. So,
I took the winmodem out of my PC and bought an external serial modem, which has been working beautifully since (and took less than a minute to set up).


... Sometimes you just have to admit it's not gonna work

And no, I can't enlighten you

You'll find a very good guide on ppp aticewalkers which should answer most of your questions.

All right, I succeded in making it work right. In fact I got it right even before I knew that.

It seems to me, however strange it sounds, that kppp couldn't understand that I changed the permissions of the files needed in the time I did that (am I talking nonsence?) but I had to restart X session for it to grasp that fact.

Anyway everything works, permissions are restricted to a group which has read access to the /etc/ppp files so that the Administrator (me) do not need to worry about other malevolent users(again me; others using this computer know just enough of Linux to select WinXP menu item from a little red box showing when they turn the computer on, or else some weird penguin starts eating their WinWord documents:-) of the system(consisting of 1 computer).

Now, just to get that wheel workin'...

Cheers!

Hello Zwyrx,

I assume that the modem hardware works...

Did you include your ISP DNS servers, this can sometimes be the problem.

OK people thanks for help, i think i will post some other things related to this on slackware forum.