A problem with dialup
 

I just recently installed Archlinux 0.5 and i'm having trouble with a dialup connection. I have an external modem and when I try to connect with Kppp everything is fine but then when i'm connected I recieve no packets and can't browse the web. Any suggestions?

Do you have lights on your modem? Or how about another phone plugged into that line. That way you can see if you actually are connected, and its not just disconnecting you right away.

Do you have a firewall running? Have you had any problems with other distros?

Have you updated to the latest -CURRENT, there may have been some package fixes?

I had the same problem and found that it was caused by the options file in /etc/ppp

Backup your existing options file and create a new one with:

noauth
defaultroute
lock
ipcp-accept-local
ipcp-accept-remote
usepeerdns
passive

I must admit, I've never looked into what everything in this file does, but it got me up and running.
I found it at:
http://uklinux.net/support/connect.php3

Thanks, i'll try that.

Ok well I can now connect fine using kppp by making those changes to ppp like you said...however I would like to try connecting without kppp and I tried using the HOWTO's for ppp and could not get a ppp connection to work. I then installed wvdial and tried to run wvdial but it said I was missing "libcrypto" Yet I have installed the pkg for wvdial and it's dependency wvstreams. Any suggestions?

Did you install the wvdial and wvstream packages from the Arch official site? I've used these in the past, and haven't had any problems.

Are you testing/running wvdial as 'root'? I know that it doesn't like being run as anything else unless permissions are set properly.

Yes I used the wvdial and wvstreams package right from the Arch Linux ISO and I tryed to run wvdial as root and as a user.

We probably missed a dependency when package wvdial. Try installing openssl if you haven't already. It provides libcrypto.so

Thanks, installing openssl solved the dependency problem and I can connect with wvdial....however I am still getting the "host unknown" whenever I try to ping a site or browse the web...I just don't understand how kppp works fine but when I use the commandline it screws up. I've tried different combinations for the ppp scripts and wvdial.conf yet it still won't work.

**Edit** I just found a HOWTO on my isp's website giving details on how to setup a ppp connection in linux (http://www.starpower.net/customer/in..._faq_linux.php), i'm going to try it out and hope it works.

...however I am still getting the "host unknown" whenever I try to ping a site
 

Bit of a long shot this one, but something else I remember having to do is delete (rename or backup) /etc/resolv.conf, and then create a sym link from /etc/ppp/resolv.conf to /etc/resolv.conf. If the resolv.conf doesn't exist in /etc/ppp/ then create an empty one first.

Hope this helps, I'm starting to run out of ideas. :) Dial-up has always given me headaches no matter what disro I've tried.

Good news! I finally got everything working right...I could've sworn I tried this before but maybe I did something different this time. I edited rc.d and commented out eth0 and tryed changing the dns servers in resolv.conf again and now it works. Even though this was a frustrating experience...Arch Linux has helped me learn more about linux and so far it's the best distro i've used.