Re: tlug: PAP and CHAP

[Dennis McMurchy <denismcm@example.com>]

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tlug note from Dennis McMurchy <denismcm@example.com>
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On Sun, 11 May 1997, Alan B. Stone wrote:

> I'm thinking that
> within the RedHat netcfg, not only can you have it send whatever you
> type in, but I'm wondering if you can indicate a file to use for
> connection?  Either way, thanks.  I will give it a try.  I'll let you
> know what happens.

  Sounds to me (forgive me if I'm wrong) that you're still thinking
in terms of somehow manually logging.  I would think what you want to
do is to click once wait thirty seconds and have a ppp connection to
your ISP all ready to use for sendmail, Netscape, telnet, or whatever.

  What I do may not be elegant, but should work with any Unix-like
OS (does work with Slackware 3.1 kernel 2.0.26).

  1. My dial-in script and other net stuff is all one click on a
     fvwm window manager menu, but doesn't have to be.  In fact, I was
     executing everything manually at the prompt, until I set up one
of my machines for a group of ordinary users to use recently.  I must
admit, it's a lot nicer having everything on the menu.

  2. The dial-up script I use:

/usr/sbin/pppd connect '/usr/sbin/chat -v "" ATDT7241745 CONNECT "" \
 ' /dev/cua1 38400 -detach debug crtscts modem \
 defaultroute noipdefault user denismcm  &

  This will work for you if you change the phone number, possibly
the /dev/cua1 (if your modem is not on that device - could be cua0,
say, on your system), possibly the speed could be 19200 if you have
a 14.4 modem, and of course, the username (denismcm in my case).  
Every one of those quotation marks and slashes is _essential_.
Also, of course, depending on your distribution, pppd and chat may
live in different directories.

  This script assumes there is a /etc/ppp/pap-secrets file (such as
Jim or Andrew mentioned) that looks like this:

#client         server          secret
denismcm         * 		MyPassword

  3.  It generally takes about 25 seconds for the connection to be
made and the ppp link negotiated.  The -v switch after /usr/bin/chat
makes a pretty detailed record of these negotiations between the two
machines which is logged in /var/adm/messages, and can be very useful
in debugging the connection if there are any problems.  It will also
record your dynamically allocated dotted quad internet address, which
you'll need should you want to fancy things like putting your machine
on the net and so on.  Once you have everything working, you may want
to turn off the -v switch.

  4.  You can verify that the connection is up with this one-liner:

		/sbin/ifconfig

which will display something like this:

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Bcast:127.255.255.255  Mask:255.0.0.0
          UP BROADCAST LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:3584  Metric:1
          RX packets:150 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0
          TX packets:150 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0

ppp0      Link encap:Point-Point Protocol  
          inet addr:202.243.60.70  P-t-P:202.243.60.4  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:8 errors:1 dropped:1 overruns:0
          TX packets:11 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0

If your ppp link is not up, of course only the lo section displays.
Or you can just watch the display in the 'pppcosts' window, if you have
that running.  I recommend pppcosts to anyone who has to pay local phone
charges.  It keeps a (very accurate) cumulative tally of your total
online time to date and provides a real-time one-line display of how
long you have had the current connection up.  The window looks this
when you're online: 

ONLINE: 00:07:17 (3 units, JY 30)  
Total online: 08:23:34 (196 units, JY 1960)
ONLINE: 00:03:04 (2 units, JY 20)  

  The top line is the last session, the middle line is total to date,
and the bottom line is the current session.  I did the modifications
for NTT rates myself and they are now part of the distribution.
Unfortunately, I don't seem to have a useful URL for this, but it's
just a little file (18K or thereabouts), so I could easily make it
available through email or on my website, if you can't find it.  I love
it.  

  5. I use sendmail for outgoing mail.  sendmail -q  will flush out
whatever is waiting to go out once your ppp link is up.  You could
set things up to automagically flush the mailqueue every time you go
on line, but I don't bother myself.  I explicitly invoke sendmail.
  I sometimes use a little script called peek.mailqueue to make sure
everything has gone out:

ls -l /var/spool/mqueue/*

If you ever need to operate directly on the queue,of course, you can
do so as root.  Nice for those times when you really were a little too
acid in your email.

  6. I used to use an extraordinarily complicated script written using
Expect to grab my mailbox, until I discovered popclient, which works
very nicely and is standard fare (at least with Slackware - come to
think of it the latest Slackware popclient is buggy - you'd want the
older one - version 2.21, I think).  This is my mailgrabbing script:

/home/denisbin/pop/popclient -3  -v -u denismcm -p MyPassWord -o /home/denis/internet/postbox popmail.gol.com
cat /home/denis/internet/bell

This gets my mailbox from the ISP and drops it into 
/home/denis/internet/postbox for me, deleting the messages from my
box at the ISP, and then cat's a   (which rings the bell on my terminal -
there must be a more elegant way to do this though -  letting me know the
download is finished).

  7. If you do a lot of ftp'ing or telnet'ing or want to put your machine
on the net, I have some handy scripts for that too, which I could share
with you.  

  8. I find that for grabbing the small amounts of news I want to read
that the program called 'suck' works really nicely.  It's on the archive
CDs and sunsite and so on.  Works very well for what I do.

  9. And finally, you want to shut down your link sometimes ;-).
I use a little script like this:

  #!/bin/sh
  #this program was clipped out of the linux ppp-howto file
  DEVICE=ppp0
  #
  # If the ppp0 pid file is present then the program is running. Stop it.
  if [ -r /var/run/$DEVICE.pid ]; then
          kill -INT `cat /var/run/$DEVICE.pid`
  #
  # If the kill did not work then there is no process running for this
  # pid. It may also mean that the lock file will be left. You may wish
  # to delete the lock file at the same time.
          if [ ! "$?" = "0" ]; then
                  rm -f /var/run/$DEVICE.pid
                  echo "ERROR: Removed stale pid file"
                  exit 1
          fi
  #
  # Success. Let pppd clean up its own junk.
          echo "PPP link to $DEVICE terminated."
          exit 0
  fi
  #
  # The ppp process is not running for ppp0
  echo "ERROR: PPP link is not active on $DEVICE"
  exit 1

  Gee, I had forgotten it has so many lines.  As it says, it's from
the ppp-howto.  Works just fine.

  I'm sure I've forgotten something critical, but this will get you
started anyway.  

  Enjoy,

  Dennis McMurchy,
  Tojinmachi, Fukuoka  

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