Modem configuration method
8. Modem configuration method - Here, you can have pppconfig attempt to automatically find the port that your modem is on. If a modem is not found, you will then be given the chance to enter the path to the modem device. More information about what to enter here can be found in the sidebar "Identifying and Configuring Your Modem" later in this chapter.
Save your settings by selecting Finished from the menu, and then exit the pppconfig utility. Dial a connection by using the pon command, by replacing peer with the name you assigned to your connection, or by leaving it out if your connection is named provider: # pon peer 316
You can disconnect using the poff command and can view logs (for diagnosing problems or determining status) using the plog command. The user that was created during the base system configuration will automatically have access to run these commands. Any other users who need to run them will need to be added to the dialout group through the use of the gpasswd utility: # gpasswd -a <username> dialout
Identifying and Configuring Your Modem
If your modem is not automatically on COM1, 2, 3, or 4, you may need to perform some additional configuration steps before it can be used for PPP connections. Plug-and-play and PCI modems are often found on higher ports such as ttyS4 ("COM5"). This information can often be found in the out- put from the dmesg utility. If you reached this point from stage 2 of the install, you can get to a prompt by pressing Alt+F2 and logging in as root.
# dmesg | grep tty
ttyS00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
ttyS04 at port 0xa800 (irq = 5) is a 16550A
In this case, ttyS00 is the on-board serial port (most PC motherboards have at least one of these)
and ttyS04 is probably the modem. If you have several serial ports showing up, you can create
devices for all of them (as shown following) and try them until you find your modem.
The system includes only ttyS0 through ttyS3 by default, so this device will need to be created
using the MAKEDEV command. When running MAKEDEV, you will need to leave out any leading zeros
in the device number. In this example, ttyS04 becomes ttyS4:
# (cd /dev && sh MAKEDEV ttyS4)