Re: Wierd PPP Problems
On 13 May 1999, John Hasler wrote:
> > This works best if you can call the dial-in number and talk to support
> > simultaneously. If he can't do that, then he's got the wrong Internet
> > provider.
> It will no doubt startle you to learn that some of us have only one phone
> line (and only one local ISP as well).
It will? THAT assertion certainly startles me! How do you know what I
expect unless I tell you? As a matter of fact, I normally assume that a
user normally has only a single telephone line. Even if I had been
under the impression that most people had as many telephone lines serving
their house as I have serving mine, the long hours of troubleshooting
connection difficulties with those people who have only a single telephone
line would have relieved me of that misconception pretty quick.
That's why I pointed out that it was best instead of saying something like
"you should call while you're attempting to connect." Many people I know
of will call on their cellular phones (assuming they have them---not
necessarily a good assumption for someone running a bargain-basement ISP
like Brokersys) because it makes the process so much easier. As to the
single ISP issue, I know of no localities that are served by one Internet
provider that aren't also served by one or more of the national providers.
Some of those national providers even offer 800-number access for those
areas without local POPs.
> > Of course, I have no way of knowing if Mr. Hoover did this, but asking on
> > this list about ISP connection difficulties without consulting the ISP
> > first is probably not the best way to go.
> I'm sure that this is not true of your company, but almost all ISP's would
> tell Mr. Hoover "We do not support Linux" and refuse to listen to his
> problem.
You misunderstand. I'm not telling you or Mr. Hoover to ask the ISP what
the problem is, only what a disconnect code (or however it's done on
their system) is. Since that is independent of the operating system you
use, it doesn't matter what you're running. You should NEVER expect
telephone technical support to solve your problems, you should only expect
them to provide the information you need to solve your own problems. (If
they happen to be able to tell you what the problem is, that should be
viewed as a happy windfall.)
Anyway, if they won't tell you why your connection was last dropped and
you can't find another ISP, then you're stuck with increasing the debug
level on pppd and undergoing the mind-numbing task of digging through
mounds of low-level output. (It helps if you have a good grasp of
troubleshooting techniques. For example, I'd start with attempts to
connect through minicom, though, just to see what it looks like.)
As a matter of fact, here at Brokersys, although we use Linux exclusively
for our servers (and more than a few workstations) we provide only limited
support for the Linux systems of our dial-in callers. (We have a package
that includes a pap-secrets file and a script that runs pppd and
instructions to modify those files so that they'll work for your userid,
and that's about it. There are no step-by-step instructions, like we have
for Windows-9x.) This is because there is a general assumption that a
Linux user has some idea what to do with the five critical pieces of
information and because there are 46-dozen different ways of setting up
PPP access through Linux so no useful set of step-by-step instructions
would be applicable to everyone.
However, you can call us up (the number's in the signature) and ask us
what our dial-in number is (281-774-7100 for modems, 281-774-2741 for ISDN
callers) and for the address of our DNS servers (dial-in users should use
192.168.136.1 and 192.168.136.2) and what the smtp server name is
(mail.brokersys.com) and the pop3 server name is (mail.brokersys.com) and
the Web server name (www.brokersys.com) and what caused your last
disconnect (cause code 185 or "far end disconnect", probably, if you're
having enough trouble to actually call) and we'll tell you. Why not?
That's hardly secret information.
I'd even bet that you can get that sort of information out of the big
national services, too. I've worked with some of them working out
reverse-DNS problems on a couple of occasions, so I know they have people
who work on just that sort of thing.
--
Jonathan Guthrie (jguthrie@brokersys.com)
Brokersys +281-895-8101 http://www.brokersys.com/
12703 Veterans Memorial #106, Houston, TX 77014, USA
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