BT Openworld ADSL connection problems.

[kpzani]

Hi everyone.

I am a very basic Linux user running redhat 8 dual boot with XP Pro.

I have a bt openworld connection through a USB INTEL AnyPoint DSL 3240 modem.

I cannot connect to the net.

I can see the USB device in Linux and I have used the network config wizard to configure an the device as ethernet hardware eth1 (eth0:0 and eth0:1 are used by my NIC for my apache setup).

I then tried to configure an xDSL conn through the wizard but I just get an error after about 3mins of trying to connect saying PPP error.

Following some advice I ran
dmesg | grep -i usb
hoping to see something like
CDCEther.c: eth1: blah blah

but this was not in teh returned text. Instead I had some messages about no driver claiming my USB device.

Does this mean I don't have the correct driver for my modem?
Even though the KDE control centre can see the modem and loads of info about it. Make, Model etc.

Any help at all would be appreciated as rebooting in XP just to surf the net is really bloody annoying.

[kpzani]

This is the contents of my ifcfg-ppp0 file.

USERCTL=yes
PEERDNS=yes
TYPE=xDSL
DEVICE=ppp0
BOOTPROTO=dialup
ONBOOT=no
PIDFILE=/var/run/pppoe-adsl.pid
FIREWALL=NONE
PING=.
PPPOE_TIMEOUT=80
LCP_FAILURE=3
LCP_INTERVAL=20
CLAMPMSS=1412
CONNECT_POLL=6
CONNECT_TIMEOUT=60
PERSIST=no
SYNCHRONOUS=no
DEFROUTE=yes
USER='A062492@hg42.btclick.com'
PROVIDER=BTOpenworld
ETH=eth1

Also the error message that I get is
Unable to activate device ppp0

Cheers

Kris

[Dolda2000]

That means that you don't have the correct driver, yes. When a device remains unclaimed, it means that all loaded drivers are declining to take control of it.
I'd say that there aren't many DSL USB modem drivers at all in the official kernel tree, so if there is one, your best option is probably to go search google or the kernel mailing lists for your modem.
Another thing, though. If all you have is a clean DSL connection, you don't need PPP since DSL is basically an OSI layer 2 replacement for ethernet (ie. has about the same functional goals as PPP). Do you mean you're running PPPoE or something?

[kpzani]

Thanx for your response.

I will try an locate a driver. Intel are not supporting linux on this model but I'll keep looking.

I don't know why I used PPP. I went through the wizard for connecting to the net via ADSL. when it gave a PPP error I then checked through some books and found out about the ifcfg-ppp0 file which it stated can be used to troubleshoot internet connections (didn't specify type). SInce the file states ETH=eth1 I assumed that this simply uses an ethernet style connection but the config file remains the same. Should BOOTPROTO be set to DHCP as dialup seems to easy.

A few more questions if you've got time. what is the PIDFILE?
Also XP uses PPP or variant when connecting. If I didn't want to use PPP would my modem just connect on activation if it was configured as an ethernet adapter?

Thanks

Kris

[Dolda2000]

Maybe you are using PPPoE. I have heard in these forums that it seems to be popular for broadband ISPs these days to do that.
PIDFILE is the path to the file where pppd stores its PID.

[wassy121]

PPPoE is the only way to connect to a DSL internet provider.

[Dolda2000]

My (A)DSL modem has a pure ethernet interface.

[majorwoo]

no, now they have PPPoA

[Dolda2000]

PPPoA? Is that a typo?
Anyway, I'm _pretty_ sure my modem has an ethernet interface without any PPP interference.

[wassy121]

really, sorry, I must be ethnocentric again. What phone companies do is require a username/password to access their stuff. You can't do this in any standardized way over ethernet (that I know of). They basically don't want dhcp clients to hook up to their phone and give a request every 30 seconds (which I could see microsoft setting as a default for some reason), only to be denied. With cable what they do is put a little box at your house that downloads software updates from the cable company once in a while, and is just a modem besides that to negotiate which box it is, and whether or not I have my cable turned on.