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Re: Re. Total Confusion



On Mon, Jul 02, 2001 at 01:19:25PM -0600, Bruce Sass wrote:
| On Mon, 2 Jul 2001, D-Man wrote:
| >
| > As Wayne mentioned, minicom and wvdial aren't supposed to authenticate
| > or maintain a ppp connection, that is pppd's job :-).  minicom is an
| > _interactive_  dialer.
| 
| Minicom is a "terminal program" or "comm program"... as in dial up
| over a serial line, login, use your shell account.

Ok, sure.  I did do a _little_ bit of shell usage while trying to get
dial-up to work.  Not a useful shell (that I had), just for running
'telnet' to get to the real machines.

| > It is only inteneded to dial the modem, no
| > more, no less.
| 
| No, it is intended as a comm program.

Dialing is comm, right? ;-)

| > Also, because it is interactive, it is only really
| > useful when determining what the dialog with the ISP should be, and
| > then it is essential.
| 
| It is interactive because a comm program would be useless if it
| was not.

Right, but that means it doesn't do what I want ;-).

| <...>
| > I used minicom to see what my ISP sends and what it expects.  With the
| > knowledge of these "expect-send" pairs I set up a chat script (chat
| > controls the modem and is driven by a set of expect-send strings in a
| > config file) and use 'pon' to dial.
| 
| Sounds like a good use of minicom if you don't have serial access to a
| box.

Yep.

| <...>
| > Minicom is a great tool for determining how your ISP
| > handles an incoming call, then after that it isn't really useful
| > because (AFAIK) it isn't scriptable.
| 
| Yes it is, but if you don't have a dialup shell account the feature
| is kinda useless (it simulates keypresses), eh.

Yeah, wouldn't help too much then.  I do have a dialup shell account
and I must login, then run 'ppp', then pppd can do its thing.

| Youngsters!  What is this world coming to, never heard of a comm prg,
| probably don't know what x/y/zmodem and kermit are either.  ;)

<grin>.  I did use some modem program (I don't remember the name now,
maybe zmodem) on my Dad's Packard Bell 286 (MS-DOS 3.3) that had a
roaring fast 2400 baud modem to connect to a few local BBSes.

| just for the fun of it...
| I can dial in and read my mail/surf-the-web using a C64 and a comm
| program, and if my ZX81 was still working I could hook up a home-built
| low-speed modem I built many years ago and use it.

Pretty neat.  I never did have a comodore -- that Packard Bell was the
first machine my dad ever bought.  I was like 8 or 9 years old at tht
time.

| Maybe I'll go have a nap now, I'm feeling old all of a sudden.  :)

:-).

-D



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