Modem Problem. 3029

Bill, do windoze lusers dial in looking for a Login: prompt? In most cases, they wouldn't know what to do with one because there is no icon or OK button to click on.

The ISPs of the world support the windoze way of connecting. This means no login prompt, NO TEXT AT ALL! For people using pppd and chat, the modem dial script looks like this:

ABORT BUSY ABORT 'NO CARRIER' AT&F1 OK ATDT2662902 CONNECTd-c

Note: AT&F1 = USR-3Com AT&F (AT&F0) = Rockewll & Lucent. For users of wvdial, this means setting stupid mode (named after the application authors for failing to do their homework about how ppp works in the real world). KPPP has a similar mmode. See the chat(8) man page (from any version of ppp in the past nine years) for an explanation of that mysterious '-d-c' on the end of the script above.

This has only been going on for ten years since microsoft invented the telephone. Maybe, JUST MAYBE, Linux application authors may learn this in the next four or five years. But then, I'm also hoping that they learn to use a more appropriate modem initialization string - many of them seem to just copy some random string that some other helper program used, and never think to look at what the modem manufacturers recommend. The AT&F command has only been standard since the Hayes and USR 2400 BPS era. ('ATZ' resets the modem to some NVRAM configuration that the luser may have b0rked rather badly. 'AT' by itself does nothing.) RTFM, what a strange concept.

Old guy