| In the months after I installed Red Hat Linux 5.2,
further articles in PC Plus magazine
discussed the stages involved in connecting a Linux system to the
Internet.
In December 1998, the utility EzPPP was mentioned. This
claimed to simplify the configuration of dial-up connections to just a
few simple steps - such as specifying the phone number, user name and
password used with an existing Internet connection. This sounded
promising. Apparently EzPPP included the "chat" program which also
mentioned in the May 1999 issue. The article mentioned different
protocols for sending packets from my PC to the Internet (PPP, SLIP,
and so on). Which one to use ? I rebooted Windows, and found amongst
the Control panel settings evidence that PPP was used, so, I decided to
try that first.
Establishing PPP connections
The next problem was finding EzPPP. It was not on the
December 1998 Super CD as claimed. I found it on the January 1999 Super
CD instead. Better late than never. Also, the GUI front end was not
found - I found just a single source file eznet.c, together with a
document which included installation and usage instructions.
I compiled the source file using gcc as specified and
installed the eznet binary file in /usr/bin, making setuid root as
required. I ran the command I hoped would configure my ISP (Global
Internet):
eznet add service=global user=cater password=*****
phone=08450807777
(Of course I'm not telling you my password, stupid!)
Then I bravely tried the command I hoped would dial in
and create an Internet connection:
eznet up global
This failed with a usage error. Prompted by the
documentation, I looked in the directory /var/eznet and found various
log files. One of these included error messages from pppd (which eznet
attempts to start). These refered to a problem with the first argument
to pppd, the device file /dev/modem. I checked - and found this did not
exist. I knew the COM1 port on Windows was used for the modem. So I
created a symlink to /dev/ttyS0 (as mentioned in the June 2000 PC
Plus). I then saw different error messages from pppd - claiming that
kernel support for PPP was absent. This was serious - I had visions of
compiling and installing new kernels.
Check the documentation
I consulted the document PPP-HOWTO in doc/HOWTO on the
Red Hat distribution. I also came across the README files in the
directory /usr/doc/ppp-2.3.5. In the end I was led to examine the
syslog file for any evidence of kernel messages which refer to PPP. I
first had to look in /etc/syslog.conf to work out that my syslog file
is located in /var/log/messages. I was glad I looked. I found that the
kernel had indeed dynamically loaded the PPP module when I ran eznet.
As a desperate last try, I removed the file /dev/modem
and added an entry to the file /var/eznet/eznet.conf specifying tty as
ttyS0. Running eznet again - to my amazement - started my modem
dialling and created what looked like a connection!
In the course of this I looked more at the log files in
/var/eznet, and ran the eznet log command. This seemed to just
concatenate various of the log files. The log output includes a full
transcript of the login conversation with the ISP, which would be
useful in case of problems. There were also messages logged by pppd
outlining the PPP connection set up.
Nameservers
I ran netscape in another terminal window and entered a
URL. More error messages occurred. These were connected with something
I had read about but chosen to ignore until now - DNS entries. I had
not set up a nameserver. Not surprisingly, there was no way to resolve
www.reuters.com into the actual IP address for my browser to connect
to. In the Red Hat installation manual I discovered sections previously
skipped over concerning setup of Network connections. Soon I came
across the section on nameservers. Although the screens listed were for
gnome-linuxconf (which I don't seem to have installed yet) the
equivalent screens were easily found in the Control Panel (under
Network Configuration->Names). I added the IP addresses of the two
nameservers listed at the Global Internet site. I saved the results,
and out of curiosity looked in the file /etc/resolv.conf, mentioned in
several of the articles on PPP. To my delight, the file had been
created, and the contents looked believable. I restarted netscape,
entered www.reuters.com - and was immediately connected to the
Internet. Soon I was checking my email account, bookmarking sites in
Netscape, and so on. Connected at last.
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