[lug] Newbie tries to make laptop modem work

[Glenn Murray]

Success!  I was able to make a ppp connection last night.  But beware
of what you wish for, the connection enabled me to spend a couple of
extra hours working instead of watching DS9 reruns.

Especially in light of D. Stimits's generous analysis of my log files
it seems obvious.  He noticed strange things about eth0 and ppp, I had
just noticed that they seemed to be tangled up together.

So I popped the ethernet card out, and it worked.

Well, I also had to take down my firewall, which leads to my next
question.  How do you maintain an ipchains firewall with a ppp
connection via a modem?  Isn't the IP address you use in the ipchains
script usually assigned dynamically?  Do people actually write scripts
to read the logs, find out what ip they've been assigned and sed that
into their ipchains scripts?  I originally configured the laptop's
network stuff for the ethernet card and a static ip address.

My /cdrom still won't mount, I have
ll /dev/cdrom
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            3 Sep 18  2000 /dev/cdrom -> hdc
which worked before I installed the new kernel image, but I haven't
yet tried out D. Stimits's other suggestions.  Thanks again, D.!  I
suspect though, the problem is as simple as the permissions on
/dev/hdc aren't set the way I expect.  If not, the list will probably
hear from me.

Thanks again,
Glenn Murray
www.mines.edu/~gmurray/public_html/Welcome.html