Any one would be wondering what is behind connecting the BSNL Dataone through linux, since it is just pppoe. I would say it was simple but took around a month before I was satisfied with the setup. I would like to share my experience.
Basically my first trial was on a Toshiba S1900-203, which was actually a salvaged machine with an almost dead keyboard, and burnt batteries, as well as non responding cd rom drive.. No dont think that I was too poor to throw it away.. I just had too many sentimentals to the machine, that I thought this would be my secondary machine at home. After getting a usb keyboard mouse adapter, I did a network install of RedHat 9 onto it from my personal desktop through http. Personally I would have preferred Fedora Core, but could not find a method to start the network installation from a floppy disk.
The basic adsl-setup was tried. Well it did not have any problems in getting configured. But had the annoying problem of getting disconnected at the right time. Since I do a lot of support through ssh/ftp, and the bsnl used to have a 0 lease period for dhcp, the frequent disconnections were a real headache.
Then I came across the pppoe provided by roaring penguin. This was too good to be true, after reading through their docs, I did a download of the latest stable pppd also, compiled both and installed the same. Well my agonies were all gone.. The disconnection problem went off.. I ran the machine for two days continuous with it having the same IP, even though I got worried when a blackout occured ( my laptop does not have batteries ), but I do run the laptop from a standard 600VA ups, which kept the machine live for 20 min, the blackout was cleared in about 8 minutes, all the while hearing the UPS beeping.
Now when I checked the logs, I saw modprobe: Can't locate module ppp-compress-21, which when searched on Google, took me to this message Re: Module errors, and I just added the following to my /etc/modules.conf
alias ppp-compress-21 ppp_deflate alias ppp-compress-24 bsd_comp alias ppp-compress-26 equ
aah everything seems to be fine now..
Jiju Thomas Mathew
CTO, Saturn Infolab