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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!lucy.swin.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!news.mathworks.com!enews.sgi.com!news.caldera.com!xmission!seth.leigh!user From: seth@pengar.com (Seth Leigh) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Mini-Network ?'s Date: Wed, 19 Feb 1997 00:13:46 -0700 Organization: None, unfortunately. Lines: 134 Message-ID: <seth-1902970013460001@seth.leigh> References: <5dbio1$91b$1@nntp2.ba.best.com> <5dst9j$e5j@news.cc.utah.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: slc69.modem.xmission.com Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:35766 In article <5dst9j$e5j@news.cc.utah.edu>, match@ee.utah.edu wrote: > You're about a third of the way there. Connect the two together (with proper > termination if coax, or through a hub if it's twisted pair) and the hardware > portion is finished. That's the easy part. Yeah, but it can be a bitch if you make assumptions, like that the card automatically listens to either the coax _or_ the twisted pair jack, and it doesn't. I spent two good, whole evenings (till 1-2 AM or so) trying to get my machines to talk to each other, till I finally discovered that when I unhooked my FreeBSD machine from my brother's twisted pair network, and hooked it up via coax to my Macintosh, the network card in the FreeBSD box wouldn't talk. I had to boot up the FreeBSD box off of a DOS floppy boot disk (FreeBSD is the only OS on the hard drive) and run a program called softset to tell the card to listen to the coax jack. > > Makeing the two boxes talk to each other is a piece of cake. It's just plain > old TCP/IP stuff. Give each machine a name, build a hosts file for each, > configure and enable the interfaces and they'll talk. All this is found in the > documentation. Ask the group about anything you don't understand (be > specific). > > Setting up PPP is not so obvious. PPP is what your FreeBSD box will use to > connect to the internet. > > For starters, read the "Pedantic PPP Primer" which can be found in the > tutorials section of the documentation section on the FreeBSD.org website. It > describes in cookbook fashion how to do what you describe. (although it looks > to me to be incomplete) > > Next, study the man pages for PPP and chat. Brush up on any of the other man > pages refered to in these. When you have read all of these, next sacrifice a live chicken to the Unix god, flap your arms in funny ways, chant something scary-sounding in the language of the ancient druids, and get a good supply of food and drink, because it just may be a while. If you're like me, no expert (yet), you have a lot to learn. I don't want to sound alarmist, but I have thusfar spent about 15 evenings till 1 or 2 AM getting things all set up and hopefully running correctly. I think I am finally about there. The main problems to overcome are: The Pendantic PPP primer is incomplete; there was nothing in there about setting up routing between the FreeBSD box and another machine on the network, when static IP addresses are _NOT_ being used, but rather are being negotiated by the ppp dialer. Not to mention that there was NOTHING in there about setting up the reverse lookup stuff. The scripts in the ppp.conf seem to be rather sensitive to stupid mistakes. I spent hours trying to figure out why something wasn't working, and finally discovered that a line in my ppp.conf file was not indented one space to the right, as it _MUST_ be. Also, don't try to type in the whole dialin script the way it is in the tutorial web page. Try something extremely simple that assumes that everything works, just dials, and that's it. Add the other recovery stuff after you are absolutely sure the other stuff works. My ISP uses PAP, not CHAP. I had to have these lines in the ppp.conf: disable chap deny chap enable pap There were a bunch of things to learn about the /etc/hosts file, the /etc/sysconfig file, and a couple other files I had to mess with, whose names I am not remembering off the top of my head (to set up the reverse lookup and stuff). The default routed options in the /etc/sysconfig file have routed broadcast its routing info every 30 seconds. If you don't change this option (either from -s to -q, or from -q to -s, I forget which), your modem connection will NEVER time out, which is bad if, like me, you have only one phone line in your house. Anyways, there were a lot of things that had to be set up just right, and I had to do tons and tons of reading, and often had to interpolate info that was similar to but not the same as info in the man pages about something. I still have problems where when the modem first dials up, I can't log in via telnet from my mac (which is my only access method, as I have no monitor on the FreeBSD box at the moment). I get to the username password, I type it in, the system does a linefeed, and just sits there. After a couple of minutes I can try logging in again and it will work. This is a big pain in the butt. I have noticed a couple of times that when my machine has been running all night I can try to to access the internet, and the ppp dialer _won't_ dial. It is running, and there is no connection, but it won't dial. In fact, the only way to make it dial again is to kill the ppp dialer and launch it again. I have run into several situations where the modem is still talking (modem noises can be heard when the phone is picked up) , but the ppp program thinks there is no connection, and I CAN'T get the modem to hang up, unless I literally REBOOT the machine. I have tried echoing commands to the modem device, I have looked up source code for two different ppp dialers, and wrote a C program that made the same calls as they did to reset the modem. This program executes, but the modem is unphased by it all. The modem is an internal modem, so there is no simple flipping the power switch. Oh well, I wish I had bought an external modem, but that can't be helped now. Good luck! Seth Leigh > > If you happen to read Japanese, snag the Japanese documentation at the same > site. > > Talk to your ISP and find out if he supports PAP, CHAP, niether, or something > else (heaven forbid!) If he doesn't support PAP or CHAP consider a different > provider. If he doesn't know what you're talking about, then he's clueless and > he'll not be of any help to you. I think you can make it work without PAP or > CHAP, (never tried) but it'll be less secure. > > Once you're armed with all this information, GO FOR IT! > > Let us all know how you fair, this is a common question, and many readers on > this group are having trouble getting this to work. > > Marvin Match -- Seth Leigh Don't try to ban guns. It doesn't work. We've already banned drugs, but you can get those just about anyplace, right? Why will bad guys care what the law says if we ban guns? Think about it!