[ale] dial-up set-up

[Byron A Jeff]

> 
> Hi,
> 
> I am quite a novice at Linux and so this will probably be a bit of a silly
> question, but...
> 
> What is the most popular way of setting up a system so that it will
> automatically dial into an ISP when needed?
> 
> I am using the Redhat 6.0 distribution. I have looked at various HowTo's
> (ppp, ISP-Hookup, modem, etc) I have also found this thing called diald that
> seems quite reasonable. The end result is that there seem to be a million
> ways of skinning this cat, and I want to know a good one - reliable and
> relatively straightforward.

diald fits that bill. It takes a bit of work to set up but once you have
it'll faithfully start your network any time someone tries to access the
outside.

The latest pppd also have that same dial on demand feature. However I haven't
had the opportunity to set it up because I switched to ISDN which BTW I haven't
found a reliable way to get this feature. So I'm back to dialing by hand.

> 
> I want to set up a server on my home network that can be the Internet
> gateway for the client PCs. In the PC world I have used wingate for this
> task in the past.

You're on the right track. You'll want to set up your gateway for demand
dialing and masquerading. Since it's a dialup I presume you're not planning
on offering any services to the outside world right? If so then look into
rinetd for help.

Set up the box so that you can manually dial up and get a connection. Then
setup masqerading (see the IP-Masquerading and IP-Chains howto for info)
and make sure that your windows boxes can get out when the set the gateway. 
Finally work on adding diald.

I know that the standard distributions don't have drop and go configs for
this activity. I also believe that the Linux Router Project 
(www.linuxrouter.org) probably has all the functionality and just requires
a bit of setup.

But from 3 years experience with the setup I can tell you that it works and
it works reliably once it is setup.

Hope this helps,

BAJ