*BSD News Article 53045


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From: "Hanns B. Wetzel" <hbw@ozemail.com.au>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: PPP and/or SLIP logins under simulated Internet etc.
Date: 22 Oct 1995 02:29:29 GMT
Organization: InterBayNet
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Anyone out there please read the attached file and tell where to find
the answers to my questions.

It's no fun continuing to go round and round in apparent circles.

Any help is very much appreciated in advance.

Hanns B. Wetzel
Hervey Bay Qld
Australia

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Recently I purchased the Walnut Creek FreeBSD 2.0.5 cdroms and 
installed it on a 520MB HDD on my 486DX2-50 intel box with 20MB 
ram.The system appears to be running fairly well. Very stable in 
text mode, but it does suffer from random hangs under X11 R6 3.1.1 
when running xearth in the background. When that happens, it stops 
dead completely. No response to Ctrl-Alt-Backspace or any other key(s) 
or mouse. Turning off the power is then the only way to get things
going again. 

I think this is a major flaw because after all thatis why we are 
running Unix instead of DOS based OS's, since Unix is supposed have 
the ability to run processes independently. I hope X11 R6 3.1.2
and/orFReeBSD 2.1. will overcome this because xearth is a very nice
background. There is possibly also a problem with xearth, because when
running top it shows processor usage as high as 36+% every time xearth
updates the image. Don't know wether that is as it should be or an
indication of something wrong.

Now for my next and more serious questions. Am using FreeBSD on a small box
attempting to set up an ISP test environment in two ways:-

1.	Simulated Internet
	Have pppd running to accept logins from other machines running
	Trumpet Winsock, Windows TCP/IP or whatever. Have my machine 
	running	httpd "serving" html files and othe stuff that exists 
	on my machine's	HDD. Now there are several apparent problems:
	Although there are no problems with ordinary logins via modem 
	as a simple user, I cannot get ijppp to work in server mode 
	despite	exactly following the steps set out in its manpage. 
	I might add here that it must be the world's worst example of 
	a man page (and the sample conf files are almost totally 
	incomprehensible), the sentence	after "MORE DETAILS" needs 
	quoting in full; "Please read the Japanese doc for complete 
	explanation. It may not be useful for non-japanese readers, but
	examples in the document may help you to guess." Is this a joke???
	Toshiharu OHNO is obviously a brilliant programmer, but please,
	could he show a little concern for us lesser mortals who are 
	spending countless hours trying to get ijppp to work and do not
	know the japanese language, or even in desperation, would like
	to get the "japanese doc" translated by a friend, but have no 
	idea in the world where to find it. Also I frequently use ijppp
	under X11 R6 3.1.1 as a client side process in interactive mode 
	using manual dialing, with either Netscape 1.1.2 or Chimera. 
	Nearly every session it simply stops running at least once for 
	no apparent. There are no error messages, just the normal 
	diagnostic message "write: No such process" followed by my 
	FreeBSD command prompt. Running ps shows that it has in fact 
	exited.	

	To be able to get a system like FreeBSD plus all the utilities that
	come with it for $39.95 plus freight is absolutely tremendous. 
	However why is there is no explanation anywhere that pppd has 
	been disabled in the kerel configuration and replaced by the 
	"tunnel device". The first we get to know about it after going to
	a great deal of effort locating the ppp.FAQ on the Internet (I live
	in a rural area in Australia where phone charges to my nearest ISP
	are between $8 and $20 per hour depending on time of day), getting
	C-Kermit via ftp, compiling it, establishing its files in the
	correct directories, learning (to some extent) how to use it,
	writing the appropriate kermit scripts, pppd configuration files,
	then finally after many hours trying it out, only to be told 
	"Sorry - PPP is not available on this system" So then we forget
	all about all the time we have spent poring over the pppd manpages
	and install the ijppp package, and that	is where this story began.
	
	Now please can someone (hopefully someone like Jordan Hubbard) tell
	me why ppp was diabled in the kernel. Can I rebuild the kernel with
	both ppp and tun as pseudo devices and can I have more than one 
	instance of each (for example in the slip.FAQ, Satoshi Asami states
	"first make sure you have pseudo-device   sl  2"), or must there 
	be either one or the other. Why are there only one instace of these
	devices in the 2.0.5 GENERIC kernel. 

	I have been talking about ppp because from what	I have read and been
	told, ppp is a far better procol than slip, but	while I am waiting
	hopefully for some clear answers, I will try and get sliplogin to 
	run in the meantime and that may become another story :-(.

2.	Real Internet
	The foregoing has been attempted without a connection to the 
	Internet and using 10.0.0.0 netmask 255.0.0.0. As stated above,
	ppplogin, as described in the ijppp manpage has flatly refued 
	to work. I think that perhaps my /etc/hosts, /etc/sysconfig, 
	/etc/networks, /etc/host.conf and perhaps /etc/resolv.conf may 
	not have the IP addresses configured correctly.	

	My question now is:- 
	Do I need a real Internet address to test drive either PPP or
	SLIP logins or can (as should be possible) it be done under 
	simulated conditions as inicated above.	

Once the login problems are solved, my intention is to then try and run
sendmail, innd, and ftpd under the same simulated conditions. So far I 
have httpd 3.0 running fine locally and can access it with both Chimera
and Netscape 1.1.2 by having httpd.conf configured to pass whatever
directory as a URL. It should therefore be possible to do the same from
another machine connecting to my FreeBSD host via modem through	either PPP
or SLIP???? So how is it done.

Whover can help me find the answers to these questions will have my 
undying gratitude, because I am too old and no longer have the time to
go back to University and try and get a Computer Science Degree on the 
one hand, and cannot afford to pay a professional the going rate here, 
which is about $120 per hour, to come and set everything up for me on the
other hand.


Hanns B. Wetzel
Hervey Bay, QLD
Australia
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