Re: wvdial

["J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@umich.edu>]

On Thu, 16 Nov 2000, Marcelo Chiapparini wrote:

> I am running a fresh debian machine as a single user. When I try to
> connect to my ISP through wvdial or pon from my personal account I get a
> message complaining that I have no privilege to do the operation, I should
> be root to do it. I don't want to log as root each time I need the
> connection. How should I define the right privileges in order to run
> wvdial or pon from my personal account?

You need to have permissions to read and write the modem device (ttyS0,
ttyS1, or whatever).  If you check,

$ ls -l /dev/ttyS*
crw-rw----    1 root     dialout    4,  64 Nov 12 20:41 /dev/ttyS0
crw-rw----    1 root     dialout    4,  65 Oct 15 12:42 /dev/ttyS1
crw-rw----    1 root     dialout    4,  66 Jul  5 13:44 /dev/ttyS2
crw-rw----    1 root     dialout    4,  67 Jul  5 13:44 /dev/ttyS3

you see that adding yourself to the "dialout" group does the job; so,
issue the command

# adduser myusername dialout

and you should be OK (although some say it's a questionable security
practice to give a regular user these kind of permissions). However, I've
found that pppd, for some reason, occasionally changes the permissions of
the modem device to crw-r----, and every time that happens you have to su
to root and chmod g+w /dev/ttyS0, which gets tiresome.  So I've switched
to using pon and poff, and I've since had no problems.  Just run
"pppconfig" as route, and forget about wvdial, and you'll be
happy.---Bruce F.