Subject: diald

From: [email-masked] (Tim O'Brien)
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 08:19:24 -0500

Does anyone know how to get diald to work? I'm almost there; I can get it to 
do it's thing, dial, connect to my ISP, start sending data, but after about 
30 seconds, diald kills pppd, and reports that it has timed out waiting for 
ppp to connect. :/ Since I was in the middle of receiving an html document
from the web, I'd say it's safe to assume that pppd was already connected.
Anyone got any ideas how I can cure this VERY annoying problem? 

Thanks, 
Tim 

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---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 96 13:41 EDT

Tim>  Does anyone know how to get diald to work? I'm almost there; I can
  Tim> get it to do it's thing, dial, connect to my ISP, start sending data,
  Tim> but after about 30 seconds, diald kills pppd, and reports that it has
  Tim> timed out waiting for ppp to connect. :/ Since I was in the middle of
  Tim> receiving an html document from the web, I'd say it's safe to assume
  Tim> that pppd was already connected.  Anyone got any ideas how I can cure
  Tim> this VERY annoying problem?

Diald can be configured to do almost everything. Using it "out of the box"
with Eric Schenk's original /etc/diald.conf as packaged for Debian, I also
noticed that I could die after some seconds, claiming inactivity.

You can either modify to diald.conf so that it always stays up longer. What
I did was to add a this to /etc/ppp/ip-up 

	# send a couple of pings
	ping -c 20 -s 2048 -i 15 my.isp.provider >/dev/null

Recently, I created a fifo /etc/diald.fifo, set the option
	fifo /etc/diald.fifo 
in /etc/diald.options and wrote the following script to issue commands as
	$ dial force
etc. This is quite handy as a one-command interface for other scripts.

Hope this helps, Dirk

----------------- /usr/local/bin/dial ---------------------------------------
#!/bin/sh
#
# dial --- communicate via fifo `/etc/diald.fifo' with the diald daemon
#
# edd	12 Jul 96

if [ $# -ne 1 ] 
then
	echo "Usage: dial <command>"
	exit 1
fi
  
case "$1" in
  block|unblock|force|unforce|down|up|delay-quit|quit|reset|queue)
    echo $1 >> /etc/diald.fifo
    ;;
  *)
    echo "Unknown (or unsupported) command: $1"
    exit 1
    ;;
esac

exit 0

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

--
Dirk Eddelb"uttel                             http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/~edd

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From: Michael Karafotis <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 13:20:25 -0500 (CDT)

The problems that I was having with this a WHILE ago had to do with the
fact that I was using a cua device rather than a ttyS device.  I don't know
why this must be, but if you are using a cua device switch to its ttyS
counterpart, and cross your fingers :)

Michael

---

From: Randy Gobbel <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 11:27:21 -0700

>>>>> On Fri, 9 Aug 1996 08:19:24 -0500, [email-masked] (Tim O'Brien)
>>>>> said:

Take a look at /etc/ppp/options.  Almost everything should be commented
out--when using diald, it seems to work best if ppp gets its options straight
from diald.  I was having a similar problem, and it turned out my ppp options
file had a "connect" line in it that was causing two chats to be running at
once, fighting over the line.  Also, use the "defaultroute" option if you
haven't already turned that on.

The default diald options file seems to be set up for something like an ISDN
connection, where setting up the connection only takes a couple of seconds.  I
changed all the timeouts to be 5 - 10 minutes, and that seems to work well.

If those simple fixes don't help, turning on debugging for all the pieces
involved (pppd: debug 1 and kdebug 1, chat: -v, diald: debug -1).  This
generates quite a pile of output, but I found it very helpful in getting diald
to work.  Now, except for some annoying intermittent problems with chat, diald
is working perfectly, and in combination with ip masquerade, I've got two Macs
and a Pentium Pro happily sharing one modem.

-Randy
-- 
http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~gobbel/

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authorized representative.

---

From: Anthony Martin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 11:42:44 -0700 (PDT)

> Anyone got any ideas how I can cure this VERY annoying problem? 

I had this same problem.  Unfortunately you are the only other person I
have seen who has this problem, so I never found any official fixes.  All
I can suggest is to make sure you have the latest version of pppd and the
latest kernel, or an older version of pppd and an older kernel.  All I can
figure that there are certain combinations of pppd and kernels that have
this problem.  Mine works now with the latest kernel and pppd (I think the
'f' version).

Yes this is definitely one of the most annoying problems I have seen.
Just when you think it is working fine, it hangs up on you :-(

Tony.

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From: Owen Crow <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 12:20:30 -0700 (PDT)

> Anyone got any ideas how I can cure this VERY annoying problem? 

I had this same problem and tracked it down to the ppp-connect-with-
diald script referenced by /etc/diald.options. I assumed from the
script's name that it would invoke ppp and connect, but alas it was
only meant to make the physical connection to my ISP and exit. Diald
takes over then and invokes pppd.

This leads to the second problem: /etc/ppp/options pointed to my
chatscript (/etc/ppp/chatscript) so when diald started pppd, pppd
tried to reconnect with chat which of course didn't work so well.

In short, make sure your ppp-connect-with-diald only runs chat (with
the appropriate script) and exits, and that pppd does not 
automatically execute chat and you should be home free.

Unfortunately, I don't remember if this was the way things were setup
when I installed or if I messed them up. If the former, perhaps this
is a packaging glitch? If the latter I seem to learn the most when I
do something stupid (and I'm learning all the time).

Good luck,
Owen

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From: Mark Warburton <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 20:09:55 +0200 (GMT+0200)

Hi

I had an initial problem with diald and solved it by turning off all the 
modem-related options in the ppp config file (can't remember where, but 
somewhere under /etc).  My problem was somewhat different from yours in 
that my modem would connect to my ISP and then it woud cut before I could 
get on with my Internet connection.

I hope this will help in your case.
Regards
Mark