[ale] SUSE 9.2 dialup

Joe Knapka jknapka at kneuro.net
Wed Sep 7 18:57:16 EDT 2005


Hi everyone,

I just spent about two hours trying to configure dialup
on my friend's laptop, a Toshiba Satellite 1405 running
SUSE 9.2. I got nowhere, and would appreciate any advice
about how to proceed.

I'm not even sure if I was going about this the right
way. What I did was, I went into Yast and chose
"Network devices->Modem", configured the internal
modem (which was detected), set up a provider with
appropriate phone number, user, and password, set
the connection to dial-on-demand, set the modem speaker
to "on", saved everything, and opened a browser.
Nothing happened, except that the browser said
"host mindspring.com not found".

I also tried starting the connection from kinternet,
which didn't seem to work either. It wasn't totally
obvious how to interpret the kinternet icon's
state (plug with little "D", plug with red ring
and little "D", plug with lightning bolt and
little "D"), but I never heard the modem make
a sound (which I would expect if the modem speaker
was enabled). The kinternet log seemed to indicate
a successful connection, but not even the server
endpoint address for the ppp0 interface could be
pinged.

Unfortunately, my friend didn't seem to have any
of the standard talking-to-the-modem-by-hand tools
(such as minicom) installed, so it was really hard
to tell whether the modem had even been configured
appropriately.

I also tried the same dance with a PCMCIA modem
that I've used successfully under RH and Slack,
but SUSE behaved exactly the same way: it seemed
to see the modem, but getting it to actually
use the modem was something of a mystery.

Any pointers?

Thanks,

-- Joe Knapka

P.S. His kernel was also emitting
{DriveReady SeekComplete Error} messages once
per second or so. I told him that his hard drive
is probably dying. Windows XP, of course, doesn't
seem to notice any problem.



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