Hi.

I know that debian users start and close a ppp connection with the commands
'pon' and 'poff' respectively.
With Mandriva these commands do not seem to work:
in fact, in my Mandrake 10.1 ppp is regularly installed, but 'pon' and 'poff' are
'not found' by the system.
Does anybody know what should I use in their place?

Thanks,
Rodolfo

I take it that you are only using the command line?

If not, then kppp will manage your dial-up settings, or Mandrake Control Centre should also.

You may be able to add an alias to the config file that starts and stops the interface, probably in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts and called ppp0 or something like that. Don't know for certain as I don't use ppp.

HTH

I had some issues with other network utilities in mandrake 10.1, like ping, traceroute, etc. Seems like the issue was that the directory (/etc/sbin?) wasn't in my path.
I don't rmember the specifics now, but perhaps one of the gurus can advise....

Its /usr/sbin and /sbin, not /etc/sbin

The sbin directories are only in the root user's PATH on any properly setup distro because the programs in sbin directories are root-only commands. On Mandrake ping is /bin/ping (so that it can be run by typing the command 'ping' by any user) whereas traceroute, which must be run as root, is in /usr/sbin/traceroute, so you can either su - into root and run traceroute or just do 'sudo traceroute'. This is the correct setup - there's no point having sbin directories in user's PATHs because they can't run any of the programs in there.

See: http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-...SYSTEMBINARIES

That's a good place to start looking handydan (well, in /usr/sbin, not /etc/sbin) when you can't find a command at the terminal as a normal user.

I think though, after some googling, that pon and poff are Debian specific scripts. But like I mentioned before, you could easily write a script to emulate them.

http://annys.eines.info/cgi-bin/man/man2html?poff+1

cragstar wrote:

> I think though, after some googling, that pon and poff are Debian specific scripts. But like
> I mentioned before, you could easily write a script to emulate them.


Yes, but *how*?
Excuse me, I'm newbie, could you suggest how to do so?

Rodolfo

I don't know much about dial-up in Linux but don't you just use normal ifup and ifdown commands on the ppp interface (ppp0?) to bring it up and down? Have you used the Mandrake Control Centre to configure your connection? Are there any files in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ that relate to ppp?

As long the ppp interface has a corrsponding config file you should be able to runto start the dial-up interface with the default settings (the settings from the Mandriva Control Centre).

If it works, and you can runto disconnect, you can then create a link to each file like this (make sure you are the root user):
and
Now as any user you should be able to run pon and poff to dial and disconnect.

Just an idea - should work in theory...

You can just call it as (as root of course). Either way you'd need to have an ifcfg-ppp0 or similar file in the /etc/sysconfig/networking-scripts directory, which the Networking section in the Mandrake Control Centre should configure for you.

"The sbin directories are only in the root user's PATH on any properly setup distro because the programs in sbin directories are root-only commands"

This is not always the case. I use ifconfig to find the IP address of my machine. As user I can type in /sbin/ifconfig and get a readout on my network adapters. Can't configure them of course unless I am root. I bet there are other examples of this.

Yeah that's true - traceroute often works even when run as a non-root user for example. But just about all distros default to not having sbin in the PATH because you can't properly use those programs as non-root, only some functions work.