Re: PPTP Plugin Updated -- Again inc GPRS/Bluetooth toy!

[Antony J Mee <A J Mee ncl ac uk>]

> > > > >  This is a totally general PPPD plugin...
> > > > >           
> > > > So I imagine that now we can believe that in some time in the future
> > > > NM will make those dialers (gkdial, gnome-ppp etc) obsolete? Yay! :)
> > > >         
> > > For this see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SummerOfCode/2006/TimNiemueller
> > >
> > > I'm working on it :-)
> > >       
> > This sounds like very interesting work, thanks a lot for looking into
> > this!
> >
> > As you may or may not know Matthew Garrett (mjg59) is working on
> > teaching HAL about Bluetooth devices including providing methods for
> > discovering, pairing and querying a Bluetooth device for what services
> > it provide. 
> >     
In light of Tim and Stefan's earlier comments I decided to add a new demo
of the abstractness of the ~cough~ VPN ~cough~ architecture in NM.

As a better test of the PPPd plugin and starter stuff, I've added a
Bluetooth over GPRS connection type.  It's just a first draft, ie. the
connect script is partly hard coded as it is not yet clear precisely
how much control is required there.  Anyhow, it works connecting my
T610 to Vodafone (monthly contract) phone.  And using the new
architecture took about 20 mins to implement!

Having just heard from Marcel of this HALD support in BlueZ I've also
held off on having the ppp starter acquire the serial device properly. 
For the moment the bdaddr and channel are ignored and rather one
configures /etc/rfcomm.conf so that some /dev/rfcommXX is bound to
the appropriate channel of your phone.  Then add a symlink called
/dev/ttyGPRS to point at it.

The usual limitation it that there is no way for NM to start such 
connections
unless another connection is active. (Hopefully this is the stuff that 
Tim will
sort out.)  But it's a nice toy for the moment.

If anybody else has any pppd connections that they'd like to try via
NetworkManager then let me know.  If you can send me either a typical
command single line used to start pppd directly or equivalently the
options from a /etc/ppp/peers file and some indication of what options
are fixed by the type of connection and what are "free" choices (setup
dependent) and what authentication is needed, then I'll just pop it in.

tOnY