Re: PPP Manual Dial?

[Todd Tyrone Fries <todd@miango.com>]

>Eric> Query: Is there any way I can manually dial in, login, and initiat PPP,
>Eric> then ask 'pppd' to start?
> There is a way using minicom,
[...]
> but the cycle:
> 
>      becoming root
>      issuing pppd
>      reading /var/log/messages
>      killing pppd
>      reissuing pppd with another number/chatscript in case it was busy
>      etc...
> 
> is getting on my nerves

It would me too.
> So what I would like is some graphical front-end to pppd, displaying the
> status, and with buttons to start/stop a connection. This could be started
> by root at boot time, solving the suid problems.

This has been done.

> Including a prompt for the password in such a setup would be relatively
> trivial. 

Certainly.
> Does anyone know of something of this kind?
Surething.
> I vaguely saw a related tool for diald
Bingo.  Exactly what I had in mind.

Currently, if you setup diald, you can allow certain users access to the 
fifo that diald runs with. Then they, in turn, could use 'dctrl' which is
a tcl/tk script that shows the current status of the link, allowing you to
bring it up and down.

However, with a chat script, you would have to either
a) ask for the password in advance, write the chat script, and have chat
   do it's thing
b) run chat so that it exits when it gets the 'Password:' prompt, then ask
   the user to enter a password somehow (through a simple X dialog box or
   something) and then echo $PASSWORD ...since the 'chat script' gets stdout
   as the modem, then start a 2nd chat script to continue the connection
c) write another program that will take the place of chat that will allow
   interactive password input 'somehow'  perl, tcl/tk, python come to mind.

Hope this helps.
--
Todd Fries .. todd@miango.com