Getting in touch with your ISP

There are a lot of tools out there to assist you in establishing a connection with your ISP so you can get out there on the Internet. Most will do the job quite nicely. I have found one in particular that is the easiest of all to use. Not surprisingly that it is called eznet. It was written by Richard Hipp and it makes setting up your Internet connection absolutely trivial. For Red Hat and RPM based distributions there is a RPM package compiled by Kent Robotti and available through RPMfind.net. There is also a "tarball" available at Ibiblio's website If you're feeling adventurous, you might want to go to Dr. Hipp's website and download the C source code and compile it, which is another option.

Basically, the program asks you a series of questions about your ISP, information which this company should have given you and about where your modem is located, (what we covered in the previous section). There is a possibility to handle several different ISPs (at one point, I had 3 different ISPs configured). Once you've answered the questions and you have your connection setup, connection is nothing more than typing one command in a terminal:

eznet up 0

The program starts counting ISPs with the number 0, so that's your first ISP. Just substitute for 1, 2 etc. for other connections you may want to set up.
Other options

If you use YAST in SuSE Linux you can set up your connection using WvDial. I must confess that earlier versions of this program were not entirely successful in setting up my connection. Euphemistically speaking, they couldn't do it. This program has been greatly improved and your probability of success along with it.

If you've picked out your windows manager already and it happens to be KDE, you're in luck because there is a program called KPPP which will set up a connection for you fairly painlessly. The only problem I seemed to have with this was is known as the "negotiation" of the connection with my ISP. There are two protocols known as PAP and CHAP. If you run into this problem, it just might be a question of trying one or the other and sticking with the one that works. With KPPP, you can also tune or tweak your connection speed to get better results from your hardware.

User of Red Hat have a very powerful and simple to use graphic tool with RP3. This is standard issue on all versions of Red Hat since 6.2
For the technically curious

As you'll notice, the program I mentioned for KDE is called KPPP. The K stands for KDE but what does the PPP stand for? It stands for Point-to-Point Protocol. This protocol enables two computers to connect across a network. The protocol basically provides the means for the two computers to first, identify themselves and then ask whether the computers can read the data each other sends. In your /sbin/ directory, you'll find the point-to-point protocol daemon, or pppd which is a program that provides for that communication between computers.

What you essentially do when you set up your Internet connection is to make sure that pppd knows how to communicate the right information. If the two computers either can't authenticate themselves to each other (ie- realize that they have "permission" to communicate) or the type of data their sending is incompatible or both, then the connection fails. What eznet, kppp, RP3 and other similar programs do are to create the necessary configuration files that pppd reads. When I first set up an Internet connection with Linux, I created these files by hand without the help of one of these programs. It was an interesting exercise but essentially took a long time to figure out at those days. If you're interested in finding out what goes on behind the scenes, I suggest you check out the page Linux Dial-Up Networking in a Nutshell which has a nice list of the processes and files that come into play.
A common problem

The most common problem I have come up against is that somehow the very important configuration file /etc/resolv.conf gets overwritten. This happens with some Linux distributions and the reasons are numerous and I usually chalk it up to what I called excessive "meddling" with important configuration files on the part of some major Linux distributions. The symptom of the problem usually is that even though you've connected to your ISP, you're not reaching pages out there. The first thing you should do is make sure /etc/resolve.conf includes the two or more IP addresses of the domain name servers; those machines that translate for example, www.linux.org, into our actual numerical address. As I mentioned in the section on ADSL, it should look something like this:

nameserver 30.30.30.30
nameserver 40.40.40.40

Your numbers will of course be different, but if you don't see at least two lines like this: nameserver plus an IP address, then you'll have to add it again. Then you should find out why and how your distribution is over-writing this file so it doesn't happen again, unless, of course, you want it to. SuSE, for example, has a section in their YAST tool where you can configure it not to overwrite certain files like resolv.conf.

That pretty much sums up setting up dial-up connections. Happy surfing with Linux!