dial up help

[Wayne Conrad]

I'm not really going to answer your question -- I don't know how.  But I'll tell you a different way to solve the problem: Don't mess with configuring dialup on Mandrake, Redhat, Debian, Windows, or whatever.  Instead, get an old 386 or 485 with 8MB of RAM and a floppy drive, a NIC, and a modem.  Download the Freesco disk image (www.freesco.org), boot the box with it, configure the box to be a dial-up router with DHCP support, and plug your Mandrake box (and any other boxes you have) into it via an ethernet hub.

You only need a monitor and keyboard on the box when you're configuring it the first time.  After it's set up, you can administer it via telnet.

Other hardware you'll need: A NIC for each box you want to connect to the router ($10-$25 each), a hub ($20 at Fry's electronics, although if you want to be very cheap and only want to connect one PC to the router, you can skip the hub and just use a crossover cable), and cables (perhaps $5 each, depending upon length and where you get them).

The networking parts are so cheap now that only students are allowed to whine about the cost :)  And if you don't have an old 386 or 486, just go to garage sales and thrift stores.   A good one is usually $20 or less (or free, if you pass by a neighbor throwing one out).

It's more work and more hardware, but for me, it's a whole lot less frustrating to get dialup working on Freesco than it is to get it working in a "regular" distro.  The bonus is that you won't ever have to configure dialup on any of your machines, for any operating system, ever again.  You just configure each operating system on each machine to do DHCP.  And if you change ISP's, or get DSL, or get cable modem, or whatever, all you have to do is reconfigure the router and go -- you won't have to reconfigure each OS on each box on your LAN.

Freesco even lets you switch back and forth between different configurations.  I've got my router set up with two different dialup ISPs and my DSL line.  When the DSL line goes down, I just use my browser to tell the freesco box to become a dialup router again and my network is back online.

Oh, and you get firewalling, too.  And NAT.

That's my sideways answer, which doesn't really answer your question but presents another way to solve the problem.

    Wayne

On Wed, 11 July 2001, Ho Ping wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I am very new to Linux. I have thus far been able to
> install/boot Mandrake on my second partition.
> How/Where do I begin to configure a dialup to my ISP.
> I have contacted the ISP and received the standard
> "Huh" reply. My Win98 dials up just fine, so I am not
> detered at this time.
> 
> Help?
> 
> Bob