[H-GEN] modem/ppp problems

[Sarah Hollings]

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hiya,

A while ago some very helpful types on this list gave me some clues that
resulted in fixing the sound problems I had with my Linux machine at
home.  I am a newbie, I guess, but I have learnt heaps about Linux, and
in particular modules, and dependencies thru that exercise.

Now I have a really intractable problem with my dialup access to the
'net, which my limited expertise has not been able to give any clue. 
It's forced me to send this mail from my windoze partition (which
annoyingly enough is working just fine with the same modem etc)... grrr.

Machine:
Pentium 133 with couple of HD's, running Debian (Corel distro, with KDE
desktop) 2.2.14 kernel, 33.6 ext modem on ttyS1.  kppp gui dialer. 
dualboot from lilo with win 98.

Symptoms/errors:
#1:  After boot-up, running the kppp dialer (which has worked just fine,
prior to upgrading to 2.2.14 from 2.2.12) reports in its "log" window:   
/* usual modem initialisation ATZ, volume setting etc, etc */
ATDT32442366 <edit

Where the tone dial instruction echoes really quickly, and the edit flag
thingy comes out quite slowly.  Every so often it gets further than
this, even connecting (but if it does, it's only at 9600, and then
proceeds to error #2).

#2:  After giving error #1 exactly once, it then runs the dialer thru,
connects at 115200 and passes control to the ppp daemon.  Which then
"terminates unexpectedly".

#3:  Finally, it dials and connects, the pppd takes control and runs,
apparently just fine.  But I cannot connect to any server, download
mail, view any web pages etc.  Pinging the isp's name servers gives 100%
packet loss.

Suspicions:
I think error/symptom #3 is caused by something different to the first
two.  I am pretty sure I saw on the lists a while ago, someone having
very similar problems.  At one stage I think I may have caused the #3
problem while playing around with something in the /dev directory trying
to fix #1 and #2.  When I click the "query modem" button in the kppp
dialer program which used to get some hardware values from some kind of
eprom in the modem (like the connect speed, model number, "rockwell
something?" etc etc) it gives different/garbled values, so maybe some
kind of serial driver is screwed up?

I can't find any log files to look at (and something was always wrong
with the dialer, maybe permissions, because it keeps reporting that it
can't access log files read or write).  There may be log files
elsewhere, but I am not sure where to look.

Sorry if this is something really obvious, or this sounds clueless, but
I seem to have made things worse so far, so I don't know what my next
step should be!!

Thanks!

Sarah

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