This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Subject: Re: PPP fails in RH 6.1 [more] From: David Taylor <knet@mailandnews.com> Date: Thu, 04 Nov 1999 09:15:42 +1100 > >>Nov 3 16:02:58 localhost modprobe: can't locate module char-major-108 > > I've seen this as well for "module char-major 110" under RedHat 6.1. > Whatever the case, it doesn't work for me either. > > The Mandrake 6.1 doesn't appear to have this problem. > > Does anyone know what the "can't locate module char major" message means > exactly? I fixed the "can't locate module char-major-108" problem by placing the following entry in /etc/conf.modules: alias char-major-108 ppp_generic I found this hint in the ppp documentation (/usr/doc/ppp-XXXXX). However, that seems unrelated to my ppp problem of: pppd[30575]: The remote system (ppp0) is required to authenticate itself but I pppd[30575]: couldn't find any suitable secret (password) for it to use to do so. I'm stumped. The lights come on but nothing happens. It's as if ppp is waiting for permission to begin dialling. Surely I can't be the only person who's had this problem. I hope not... === Subject: Re: PPP fails in RH 6.1 [more] From: "Steven Hildreth" <steven@aprotex.com> Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 08:24:08 -0600 David Taylor <knet@mailandnews.com> wrote: > To further my question about why my modem won't even pick up, here is an > excerpt from /var/log/messages: > > Nov 3 16:02:58 localhost ifup-ppp: pppd started for ppp0 on /dev/modem > at 115200 > Nov 3 16:02:58 localhost modprobe: can't locate module char-major-108 > Nov 3 16:02:58 localhost pppd[30575]: The remote system (ppp0) is > required to authenticate itself but I > Nov 3 16:02:58 localhost pppd[30575]: couldn't find any suitable secret > (password) for it to use to do so. > > I believe those last two lines may be very relevant... I don't know > where to look next, though. might try putting 'noauth' in your /etc/ppp/options file, and turn off the authentication. If it works, there lies your problem. === Subject: Re: PPP fails in RH 6.1 [more] From: Nick Urbanik <nicku@vtc.edu.hk> Date: Wed, 03 Nov 1999 22:18:45 +0800 David Taylor wrote: > To further my question about why my modem won't even pick up, here is an > excerpt from /var/log/messages: > > Nov 3 16:02:58 localhost ifup-ppp: pppd started for ppp0 on /dev/modem > at 115200 > Nov 3 16:02:58 localhost modprobe: can't locate module char-major-108 The README.linux file says: If you use module autoloading and have PPP as a module, you will need to add the following to /etc/conf.modules: alias tty-ldisc-3 ppp_async alias char-major-108 ppp_generic > Nov 3 16:02:58 localhost pppd[30575]: The remote system (ppp0) is > required to authenticate itself but I > Nov 3 16:02:58 localhost pppd[30575]: couldn't find any suitable secret > (password) for it to use to do so. > > I believe those last two lines may be very relevant... I don't know > where to look next, though. The default in pppd is to use authentication. If you want to log in to a terminal session, then start ppp at the other end, then you need noauth in your options. If you want to run pppd as a normal (non-root) user, then you need to put your options in a file (say) hostname for that host in the directory /etc/ppp/options/, then use pppd call hostname. Sprry. it's late, and I need to get back to my baby. If this makes little sense, please feel free to ask. All the best to you. === Subject: Re: PPP fails in RH 6.1 [more] From: "Andy Thomas" <andyth@postalzone.com> Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 22:34:14 -0800 >>Nov 3 16:02:58 localhost modprobe: can't locate module char-major-108 I've seen this as well for "module char-major 110" under RedHat 6.1. Whatever the case, it doesn't work for me either. The Mandrake 6.1 doesn't appear to have this problem. Does anyone know what the "can't locate module char major" message means exactly? === Subject: Re: Broken PPP daemon From: Benno Senoner <sbenno@gardena.net> Date: Sat, 30 Oct 1999 01:46:58 +0200 On Fri, 29 Oct 1999, JF Martinez wrote: > First time the PPP daemon is started it fails. I found this is > realated to the fact it tries using /dev/ppp who is a pseudo device > availble in 2.3 only. Could someone fix that please: it makes the > user spending two phone fees instead of one. > I experienced it too, using an USR V.90 analogue modem, very annoying. But strange that Redhat doesn't test this properly before releasing the distro. At least doing some printing tests (lpd is faulty too in RH 6.1) and some dialup tests wouldn't take too much effort. === Subject: Re: Broken PPP daemon From: Benno Senoner <sbenno@gardena.net> Date: Sat, 30 Oct 1999 02:34:15 +0200 On Sat, 30 Oct 1999, JF Martinez wrote: > > > > About printing I think the problem is realeted to the fact that > parport_lowlevel is not aliased to parport_pc in /etc/conf.modules > > I cannot test it dierectly becsue I have no priner but that is the way > I managed to have my printer working. > > By the way am I the only one who resents that Dial-up users are > treated like second class users not only by RedHat but by about every > Linux distribution? We are in 1999, Linux distributions have been > available since 1993 and from the start there was one distinguishing > point between Linux and Unix: Linux was affordable by private > individuals and that meant a significant amount of its users would be > home users connected through dial up networking. However after six > years we still have the red carpet being unrolled before the ethernet > user and to hell with the private user: only the LAN user gets network > configuration at install time, no effort is made for coping with > situations inherent to non-permenent acces to the net, PPP is not > tested and RedHat issues a network config tool who doesn't allow the > user to autoconfigure DNS. The PPPd daemon is able to ask the ISP's > daemon what is the DNS to use if only it is strted with the right > parms. The only thing lacking is a nice little button in the config > tool telling to configure PPP for using this feature. > Yes I fully agree, sometimes I think "what if I were a newbie user which wants to connect to the internet using RH 6.1 ? " ... no way ! not to mention the crashes of netscape, which now crashes almost every 5min. kppp is broken too ( ppp permissions / root rights etc.) , that means the newbie is unable to set up a ppp connection by using this nice GUI tool. Linux definitively needs DNS autodetection during ppp dialup, because for much users it is too hard to DNS manually, and if you use multiple ISPs it becomes really annoying. === Subject: Re: Broken PPP daemon From: Benno Senoner <sbenno@gardena.net> Date: Sat, 30 Oct 1999 02:34:15 +0200 On Sat, 30 Oct 1999, JF Martinez wrote: > > > > About printing I think the problem is realeted to the fact that > parport_lowlevel is not aliased to parport_pc in /etc/conf.modules > > I cannot test it dierectly becsue I have no priner but that is the way > I managed to have my printer working. > > By the way am I the only one who resents that Dial-up users are > treated like second class users not only by RedHat but by about every > Linux distribution? We are in 1999, Linux distributions have been > available since 1993 and from the start there was one distinguishing > point between Linux and Unix: Linux was affordable by private > individuals and that meant a significant amount of its users would be > home users connected through dial up networking. However after six > years we still have the red carpet being unrolled before the ethernet > user and to hell with the private user: only the LAN user gets network > configuration at install time, no effort is made for coping with > situations inherent to non-permenent access to the net, PPP is not > tested and RedHat issues a network config tool who doesn't allow the > user to autoconfigure DNS. The PPPd daemon is able to ask the ISP's > daemon what is the DNS to use if only it is strted with the right > parms. The only thing lacking is a nice little button in the config > tool telling to configure PPP for using this feature. > Yes I fully agree, sometimes I think "what if I were a newbie user which wants to connect to the internet using RH 6.1 ? " ... no way ! not to mention the crashes of netscape, which now crashes almost every 5min. kppp is broken too ( ppp permissions / root rights etc.) , that means the newbie is unable to set up a ppp connection by using this nice GUI tool. Linux definitively needs DNS autodetection during ppp dialup, because for much users it is too hard to DNS manually, and if you use multiple ISPs it becomes really annoying. === Subject: Re: Broken PPP daemon From: Alex Withers <awithers@gonzaga.edu> Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 16:01:51 -0700 (PDT) On Sat, 30 Oct 1999, Benno Senoner wrote: > > By the way am I the only one who resents that Dial-up users are > > treated like second class users not only by RedHat but by about every > > Linux distribution? We are in 1999, Linux distributions have been > > available since 1993 and from the start there was one distinguishing > > point between Linux and Unix: Linux was affordable by private > > individuals and that meant a significant amount of its users would be > > home users connected through dial up networking. However after six > > years we still have the red carpet being unrolled before the ethernet > > user and to hell with the private user: only the LAN user gets network > > configuration at install time, no effort is made for coping with > > situations inherent to non-permenent acces to the net, PPP is not > > tested and RedHat issues a network config tool who doesn't allow the > > user to autoconfigure DNS. The PPPd daemon is able to ask the ISP's > > daemon what is the DNS to use if only it is strted with the right > > parms. The only thing lacking is a nice little button in the config > > tool telling to configure PPP for using this feature. > > > > Yes I fully agree, sometimes I think "what if I were a newbie user which wants > to connect to the internet using RH 6.1 ? " ... no way ! > not to mention the crashes of netscape, which now crashes almost every 5min. > I was big time dailup user, even before ppp was mainstream. Compared to today I have found the setup to be far easier back then. I think the massive amount of dailup utilities only confuses the newbie. And it doesn't help when redhat avoids the issue during install. I've always thought that perhaps a layer of abstraction should be put over the modem when used for ppp. The system could think of it too as a network device and configuration would be hanlded by the kernel. But something in the back of my head tells me this is evil... Anyway, my dailup concerns have long since disappeared due to college. :) === Subject: Re: Modem security (was Re: Wow! Kppp-user-works(was Configuration From: Zoki <zoki@magic.fr> Date: Sat, 30 Oct 1999 14:05:29 +0200 (CEST) On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, Alan Mead wrote: ->At 08:31 PM 10/4/99 PDT, fengping li wrote: ->>Hi, Stephen, James and other friends, ->> ->>First Thanks to Zoki<zoki@magic.fr>, who posted the very usful informaiton. ->>Having taken his(her) advice, I configured my Kppp *** It's a "his"... ->>and now I can dial-up as a "user" instead of "root". The following ->>is the key commands you should follow: ->> ->>as root, ->>chmod 666 /dev/ttyS0 (Note that your port might be ttyS2 or ->> something else, test it) ->>chown root:root /usr/sbin/pppd ->>chmod +s /usr/sbin/pppd ->>chmod 666 /etc/resolv.conf -> ->I stumbled on Kppp last night and figured the above out (I didn't do ->anything to resolv.conf, what does that do?). I like it. But I was ->wondering what the security implications are. I suppose they are: *** Like the name says : It resolves. In our case it resolves names. It should contain the names of your ISP DNS's (Domain Name Server). The syntax is: search [your_ISP_domain_name] nameserver xxx.xx.xx.x nameserver xxx.xx.xx.x === Subject: Re: Broken PPP daemon From: JF Martinez <jfm2@club-internet.fr> Date: Sat, 30 Oct 1999 20:32:18 +0200 > > On Fri, 29 Oct 1999, JF Martinez wrote: > > > > > First time the PPP daemon is started it fails. I found this is > > realated to the fact it tries using /dev/ppp who is a pseudo device > > availble in 2.3 only. Could someone fix that please: it makes the > > user spending two phone fees instead of one. > > > > -- > > Jean Francois Martinez > > > > Project Independence: Linux for the Masses > > http://www.independence.seul.org > > > > -- > > To unsubscribe: > > mail -s unsubscribe redhat-devel-list-request@redhat.com < /dev/null > > > > > Funny, the latest pppd works fine for me. Sure you got it configured > right? > > What you did special? I have seen _several_ people with the same problem some of them using kppp for configuration and others wvdialconf. So there is a problem. By the fact dod ypi upf=grade ir install afresh? === Subject: Re: Broken PPP daemon From: Erik Troan <ewt@redhat.com> Date: Sun, 31 Oct 1999 08:31:52 -0500 (EST) On Sat, 30 Oct 1999, Benno Senoner wrote: > But strange that Redhat doesn't test this properly before releasing the distro. > At least doing some printing tests (lpd is faulty too in RH 6.1) and some > dialup tests wouldn't take too much effort. The PPP problem actually affects only a small percentage of users. We had quite a few folks at Red Hat test it personally, and we tested it on a bunch of different ISPs before shipping. We can still only reproduce this problem on every third day :-( For now, try an "insmod ppp" by hand before bringing up ppp and see if that helps (it seems to fix it for most folks). We don't know why, but something seems to have changed in ppp or pppd which is causing a SIGHUP to be sent if the ppp module takes "too long" to load. I don't have any excuses for the lpd bugs :-( === Subject: Re: Remote control for PPP? From: "Steven Hildreth" <steven@aprotex.com> Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 07:45:11 -0600 Hey, you could set up the 'demand' option in the /etc/ppp/options, this would connect when a packet is needing to be sent, also might use the 'idle xxx' this would disconnect when idle for 'xxx' seconds. Couple more commands to consider when you are going to use the 'demand' like 'ip_allow_remote' and 'ip_allow_local' (or something like that, I am writing this on my winbloze workstation at work). Just a idea, as for the monitoring, maybe you could use the network throughput monitor (gnone app, forgot the name of it) it shows the throughput on all the network connections. === Subject: PPP fails in RH 6.1 From: David Taylor <knet@mailandnews.com> Date: Wed, 03 Nov 1999 15:27:33 +1100 I've setup PPP repeatedly in previous versions of RH using netcfg. It has always worked in the past. I recently installed RH 6.1. Now I cannot get PPP to work. My modem works and is configured correctly. I have checked this using both minicom and kermit. When I activate ppp0 I see the lights come on on the modem, however, that's where it all ends. The modem will stay in that state indefinitely until I explicitly deactivate ppp0. Upon activation I receive an error message (at the command line): "Failed to activate /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-ppp0" I have checked; the file is there and it appears that it is used to set variables on behalf of a script. I cannot see a reason for the failure. Can someone please give me a hint/suggestion as to what the problem is? Has anyone else come across this? If so, how did you go about fixing it? === Subject: Re: PPP fails in RH 6.1 [more] From: Larry Mintz <kabir@citenet.net> Date: Wed, 03 Nov 1999 23:30:32 -0500 (EST) On 03-Nov-99 David Taylor wrote: >> >>Nov 3 16:02:58 localhost modprobe: can't locate module char-major-108 >> >> I've seen this as well for "module char-major 110" under RedHat 6.1. >> Whatever the case, it doesn't work for me either. >> >> The Mandrake 6.1 doesn't appear to have this problem. >> >> Does anyone know what the "can't locate module char major" message means >> exactly? > > I fixed the "can't locate module char-major-108" problem by placing the > following entry in /etc/conf.modules: > alias char-major-108 ppp_generic > > I found this hint in the ppp documentation (/usr/doc/ppp-XXXXX). > > However, that seems unrelated to my ppp problem of: > pppd[30575]: The remote system (ppp0) is required to authenticate itself > but I > pppd[30575]: couldn't find any suitable secret (password) for it to use > to do so. > > I'm stumped. The lights come on but nothing happens. It's as if ppp is > waiting for permission to begin dialling. > > Surely I can't be the only person who's had this problem. I hope not... > > -- > David I had this problem when I did an upgrade. But when I did a fresh install the problem vanished. -Larry ===