dsl connects but cant do anything
 

Hi,

I use roaring penguin to connect to sbc yahoo dsl in san francisco. (th eone you downlowd from roaring penguins webpage, not the defautl red hat one).

A couple of days ago my connection went odd. I could connect but I cannot ssh or view webpages (I didnt try any other things like ftp, scp or chat programs - I will when I get home from work today to see if my connections is totally dead). I hadent knowingly altered my setup when the problem started, though I have in the end unsitalled the rpm and reinstalled it and get the same effect. The connection works ok in win2k (though it has slowed down recently - I am wondering if there could be a connection). Of course i cant use their support because they dont know what linux is, so hopefulyl some of you guys have ideas of further tests I can do in addition to chekcing ftp, chat will work etc. But even if they do why cant I ssh or see webpages? On computing.net someone suggested it is feasible (though very unlikely) sbc could be blocking linux users deliberately or unitentiionally by modifying the pppoe standard? Anyone heard anything about this?

I have also tried entering the dns addresses manually but this doesnt help either.

hi

check /etc/resolve.conf . it should have your dns address. if not you might be able to browse using ip addresses instead of domain names. do you connect as root user. if so you might have security issues.

retrace what you did that could have affected your setup. since you said that it worked obviously its related to user actions or external attacks

Maybe you just changed a firewall setting. Try something like Guarddog 2.2 to generate your firewall scripts. :)

Hi,

My resolve.conf contains:

nameserver xxx.xx.xx.xx
nameserver xxx.xx.xx.xx
search yy.yy.yy

where xxx.xx.xx.xx is not my dns address of dsl. Should I try changing this to my dsl dns address?

yy.yy.yy is the name of my network at work, so is unrelated to my dsl.

Thanks,

Mark.

hi

ya. it should be your dsl dns address. search ip address should usually be your local hostname

regards
rahul sundaram

one more thing

man resolv.conf has all the info u need

Hi,

My resolv.conf has no info on dsl connection when I conect. I am using pppoe, which has a file called /etc/ppp/ppp.conf which has this info. Should resolv.conf also have this info in this scenario?

I noticed if I do /sbin/ifconfig my connection appears to not have much passing through i.e RX bytes:1422 (1.3 Kb) TX bytes:2511 (2.4 Kb) is what is passing through ppp and RX bytes:3274 (3.1 Kb) TX bytes:9403 (9.1 Kb) through etho. However when I plug in to my network at work, which I connect to with dhcp without me having to execute any commands I see RX bytes:48261525 (46.0 Mb) TX bytes:3851308 (3.6 Mb) for etho - I am not sure if these values are cumulative, which would matter because the dsl values are taken when I was connected for 5 minutes and perhaps dont reflect connection speed.

Does this suggest any specific problem I have? I guess I will go see if I have a bash history file of some sort to see if I did do something bad.

Also I tried amsn messenger (yes, in linux) and it didnt work, just like ssh and web browsing.

Thanks,

Mark.




so it seems I dont connect properly. I tried adding my dns names to resolv.conf after connecting but this had no effect.

hi

i am not sure of the issue. route -n or something may help find your hurdle. i really dont have any experience with pppoe so i will just shut up and let someone else handle this :-). there is pppoe howto . google it. ask your local lug and consult distro specific docs too

regards
rahul sundaram

check your firewall too

iptables -L

pppoe (well the roaring penguin one), which is what I tried at first, isnt very helpful for thsi particular problem. It basically says my problem is not having the right dns addresses, but as I found out this doesnt solve the problem. man adsl-start doesnt reveal any sort of debug option either. I will try your suggestions then and see what happens.

ok, it is a dns problem. So why didnt it work entering values manually? I wrote down the values when connected in windows - and apparently the dns server addresses change on a daily basis (I dont know why pppoe was handling this previously or if sbc only just started changing them). What I did was configured rpppoe (adsl-setup script) to find the dns server. Then I got booted off the connection, but I wrote down the values in /etc/resolv.conf and told rpppoe (again using adsl-setup) these values for the dns servers and it connected again (though only after rebooting). If I post this succesfully my connection staye dup longer this time.

Thanks for your help.,

Mark.

The first thing I want to know is how did you set up your dsl connection? Please, I am getting DSL on Monday, September 8 and I want to use it with Linux and erase my WinXP :). I will get a modem but I don't which one (USB or direct to my ethernet card).
Can someone tell me how to do it in Slack with a Compaq Presario 5000. Pentium IV, 512 MB Ram.

Hi,

First of all I wouldnt recomment deleting windows entirely. Heres why:

(1) I have SBC and when I moved house to avtivate my account at my new address I had to go to a webpage that is viewable in Internet Explorer ONLY - no linux browsers I tried could view it (konqueror, mozilla, netscape 7.2, netscape 4.7).

(2) If you cant connect in linux you can boot into windows and use that to look at forums like this to diagnose the problem.

(3) You only get a username and password after you set up the connection in windows. You cant get it using my method in linux - my method asumes you know your username and password.

I did it by going to:
http://www.roaringpenguin.com/pppoe/

Download the program. Then

(1)su (you have to be root to install it)
(2)rpm -Uvh rp-pppoe*.rpm
(3)source /usr/sbin/adsl-setup
(4)source /usr/sbin/adsl-start

setup is straightforward. You might get away with not doing anything with dns option - otherwise try server option.

This isnt a unique way to connect , just how I did it. Someone else will have to help you with other methods.

Good Luck!,

Mark.