Comments on SCO's pppd

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From - Wed Apr 14 05:30:14 1999
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From: Kevin Lentin <kevinl@cs.monash.edu.au>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sco.misc
Subject: Re: Manual dial-up PPP
Date: 14 Apr 1999 04:26:03 GMT
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Evan Hunt <evanh@sco.COM> wrote:
> It wouldn't be appropriate, in such an environment, to expect any
> user to enter the ISP password in order to bring up the internet
> connection.  That would only make sense for a person running OSr5 as
> a desktop workstation, logged in on the console--which is how I run it
> and presumably how you do, but it's something of a boundary condition
> for the user base as a whole.  So I'm not surprised it's never come up
> before.

I'm not using it as a desktop workstation. It's our server. I just have the
occasionaly need to make it connect to an ISP. 

What I find annoying is that what I want to do is almost identical to
something I'm already doing.
ie:
hyperion:thebe-hyperion staticdev=/dev/tty1f00 speed=9600 mask=255.255.255.0 debug=1 accm=a0000

works fine. tty1f00 is a permanent serial connection to another state.
There's no dialing.

Now I add this:
0.0.0.0:0.0.0.0 staticdev=/dev/tty1A speed=57600 mask=255.255.255.0 debug=2 accm=a0000

And it doesn't work. It should. I've established the tty1A connection using
kermit so from its point of view 1A and 1f00 are identical. So it's the fact
that one is dynamic and one isn't that is causing the problem.

So somebody at SCO must have written explicit code to stop the second case
working. Maybe.

That makes no sense to me. Why remove a feature just because you don't
believe somebody might use it?

And I should point out to the person who said I was the first person to
want this, that I currently have about 4 people in my inbox waiting for the
solution to this exact problem should I ever find it.

So far one person has actually been able to answer the question of what the
'getppphostent: no such host ID' message was all about but even that
doesn't look like helping.

> Nonetheless, you've raised some excellent points.  I'll look into
> adding this feature in a future release.

It appears to me that SCO PPP treats all of its different kinds of links as
totally different beasts instead of variants on a theme.
Some links use static devs, some let the system choose, some dial some
don't, some use dynamic IP addresses, some static. Yet all the manpages
talk about different kinds of links as if they are implemented separately.
Seems like a waste of code if that is the case. Just step through the
process doing what needs to be done. If you need to dial, you dial,
otherwise just skip it. If you need to negotitate IP addresses, choose the
right negotiation technique and go for it, or not.

-- 
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