[ale] Problems installing diald

[Matt McMillin]

Gosh, John (Mills), I wish I were writing this to contribute some sage, infallible 
bit of advice on installing diald with pppd but, alas, I have had equal amounts
of problems with it.

My pppd installation works very well.  I get some messages in my system log
that are a bit suspect, but when I type 'pppd', my machine connects to my ISP
and I can browse and FTP to my heart's content, and when I type 'ppp-off', it
disconnects.  Since I am using an IP_MASQUERADE patch to the 1.2.13
kernel, I can also use my Linux machine as an Internet gateway from my 
Win95 machine.

Then I tried installing diald.  I followed the FAQ I have religiously.  I read the 
diald mailing list archives.  I prayed to various gods to beseech me, just a
poor soul trying to get demand dialing to work.  What happens is that diald
recognizes packets that are destined for locations outside of my subnet, then
runs chat.  The same chat script and settings that work fine for pppd get me 
hardly anywhere with diald: chat calls my ISP and does its thing, then diald 
just sits there while my ISP waits for my computer to do something, and then 
finally somebody just gives in and hangs up.  (In fact, I even had to change the
parameters to chat in order for it to work correctly: it didn't like the escape
sequences that are supposed to keep my password from being echoed to the
system log.)

At least, that's how I remember it.  It was a few weeks ago that I decided it was
easier just to type 'pppd' from the Linux box, or even from a telnet session on
the Win95 machine, than it was to figure out what was wrong with diald.  I have
been wishing for a more straightforward description of methods for installing
diald and will check out Dave Snyder's piece to see if that helps.  Such 
documentation exists for packages such as pppd, Netatalk, and Samba, all of
which I have working pretty well (tip of the hat to Jay Robertson, though, for 
helping me with the finishing touches with Samba.)

My situation is somewhat different than yours, too.  My ISP account uses a
static IP address rather than a dynamic one, which may be altering the 
nature of my problem some.  As I said, I wish I had some easy solution for you,
but don't.  What I have learned from reading the mailing list archives, though, is
that it is _very_ important to ensure your PPP configuration files for running 
pppd alone and running pppd under diald are not the same.  Note carefully the
items you should be commenting out of the PPP files and including in the diald
files instead.  The documentation for diald is quite specific about this.

Good luck to you.  If anyone has had more experience with diald than we have,
please chime in.

-M