RedHat 4.1 PPP config - resolution

[jabr at tarnhelm.blu.org (John Abreau)]

I recall someone had posted a question about PPP a week or two ago. I had
experienced problems with my connection a while back; perhaps my solution
will be of some help.

I had been experiencing difficulties with my PPP account with ZipLink;
when I connected with the netcfg control panel tool, the connection was
established using the same IP address as my Ethernet card, which was
of course unroutable through Ziplink.

Ziplink's instructions for configuring Windows 95 said to use hostname
"pjabr" and IP address 0.0.0.0, and when I aded this to /etc/hosts and
changed my hostname to pjabr, the connection worked. It was an ugly
workaround, but it got me online.

I just dug through the man page for pppd, and tried out a few additional
options. I found that if I add the options "noipdefault" and "name pjabr",
then the connection works correctly. I'm not sure if I really needed "name
pjabr" at all; I'm guessing that the "name" option has to do with PAP/CHAP
authentication, which Ziplink apparently doesn't use. "noipdefault" tells
pppd not to provide a default local IP address; when I hadn't specified
this option, pppd took the IP address I'd used on my Ethernet card, and
used that for its default address.

To get this working with netcfg, I had to edit 
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-ppp. I don't like hardwiring stuff
like this, so I made my changes depend on extra config parameters I added
to .../network-scripts/ifcfg-ppp0.

Unfortunately, Redhat's netcfg tool doesn't provide for this in their 4.1
release.

--
John Abreau :: Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix :: jabr at blu.org
10 Gainesborough Street, Boston MA 02115 :: 617-321-1104 :: http://www.blu.org
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