How I got wvdial to work with AT&T

[JustGreg]

I have an external modem and have always in the past used Xeznet to control it. I have never gotten Gkdial to work with my system. One problem with my system is the serial port is a bit slow. If one tries to use the connect speed of 115200, the port drops characters. The port is reliable with a speed of 57600. That is reason it works with Xeznet, where one can set the speed. I have not found a way to set the speed with Gkdial.

I wanted to try wvdial. I could get the modem to connect, but, pppd connection would die. I now have wvdial working as well as Xeznet. I have to change /etc/ppp/wvdial to the following:
noauth
defaultroute
noipdefault
usepeerdns
name wvdial

I found that with my ISP (AT&T), I had to add defaultroute, noipdefault, and usepeerdns. These are need for pppd to connect to the ISP. I am posting this to help others.

[BarryK]

When you create an account in Gkdial, two files are created, /etc/ppp/chatscripts/accountname and /etc/ppp/peers/accountname.
(replace "accountname" with the account name you have chosen)
The latter has this in it:

Code: Select all

noauth
connect "/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/chatscripts/accountname"
/dev/modem
115200
defaultroute
noipdefault
user xxxxxx
usepeerdns

My educated guess would be that you change the 115200 to what you want.

[JustGreg]

Thanks, Barry
I will try it out and post my results. I have been using Puppy 2 Alpha for this set of experiments. I use the results in my main hard disk install for Puppy 1.0.7. I have decided to wait until Puppy 2 is released to upgrade. Puppy 2 with each update looks better and better.

[JustGreg]

Yes, it did work as you said, Barry. I now have all three analog modem dialers working. One thing with Gkdial, one has to know the log out protocol used by your ISP. For ATT, my case, it is CHAP. Xeznet and wvdial does handle that part of the ppp a little better. I did some measurements on all three dialers and Puppy 2. I made a connection for dialer to my ISP for each three times. Here are the average times for the three times under Puppy 2.

wvdial 22 seconds (all three were 22 seconds)
Gkdial 20 seconds (all three were 20 seconds)
Xeznet 28 seconds (27, 25 and 32 seconds).

Both wvdial and Gkdial place in the message file in /var/log/ the ppp connection messages. Xeznet does not seem to do this. I will have to do some research on what the log messages mean.