[ale] dial-up set-up

[Richard Whitfield]

Hi,

Thanks for the response. Wvdial seems to be a popular choice.

Reading the documentation, wvdial seems to be a dialer that will establish
an ISP Internet connection simply and easily.

However, it is not clear whether it can "manage" the connection the way
diald talks about it. With diald you can decide what kinds of IP traffic
will trigger setting up a ppp connection to the Internet and you can also
set up timeouts so that the connection is torn down when there is no more
traffic. Extra complexity of set-up does not worry me, as long as I get a
corresponding increase in the level of control. Looks like I will be trying
out both.


Regards,

Richard Whitfield
Megatrend Information Services Ltd.
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rcw at megatrend.com.hk


 -----Original Message-----
 From: 	byron at cc.gatech.edu [mailto:byron at cc.gatech.edu] 
Sent:	Tuesday, 9 November, 1999 8:09 PM
To:	RCW at megatrend.com.hk
Cc:	ale at ale.org
Subject:	Re: [ale] dial-up set-up

> 
> 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