[Setup-tool-hackers] Re: PPP Dial up tool

[Matthew Garrett <mjg59-ddl srcf ucam org>]

On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 03:23:22PM +0000, Ross Burton wrote:

> gnome-system-tools has a tool to configure network configurations, and
> PPP is one of the available types.  Use that to configure the account
> (g-s-t will be in GNOME 2.6 hopefully) and then use the Modem Lights
> applet to activate the connection.

g-s-t seems to be hardcoded to configure wvdial based scripts, which is 
mildly unfortunate - /etc/wvdial.conf is generally only readable by 
root, and wvdial isn't usually shipped suid (at least not by Debian) so 
it doesn't work if you try to connect as a user. g-s-t also has some 
strange idea that different providers correspond to different ppp? 
interfaces, and so gets upset when it connects to "ppp1" and ppp0 comes 
up. But anyway.

Modem Lights is bad crack. What we really want is something that is able
to use the g-s-t configuration stuff and just does "connect",
"disconnect" and reports the current status. I've got code that does the
latter, but not the former - working out a sensible way of dealing with
the former that will let me work as a user as well would be helpful.

> Dedicated tools are a bad solution, as there is then difficulty if I
> want to dial out and am not in GNOME.  Interfacing with the
> distributions network layer makes everything obvious and always
> available (i.e. in Debian I type "pon" to bring up the PPP connection
> which g-s-t configured for me).

Hmm. Really? Has this changed? Maybe I'm just confused by what g-s-t 
did. Hang on, let me check the source...

Hmm, as far as I can tell it still seems to configure wvdial, which 
isn't what pon uses. Uh, no, maybe it does. No, I don't understand this 
code at all :) What does g-s-t do for different distributions, and 
what's the Right Way for another application to get the list of 
configured ISPs from it?
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org
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