From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <4434515D.60005@lanl.gov>
Date: Wed,  5 Apr 2006 17:23:09 -0600
From: Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>
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To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
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Subject: [9fans] ppp going
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 307e2656-ead1-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

well, there were a host of weird problems, it now works.

one thing I totally don't understand is what happens with 'con' when I
am cpu'ed into the node. I can't get reasonable behavior using /dev/eia0.

I do this after getting in. This is drawterm to the node, as rminnich,
and then cpu -h dsn2 -u bootes.

bind -a '#t' /dev
con -b 115200 -Rs /dev/eia0

If I send the ate0 command, to disable command echoing, all commands are
always echo'd. This should not happen. If I sit at the console, and do
the exact same sequence, this problem does not occur.

What's weird: characters are not echoed twice. They are just never 'not
echoed'. You would think if there is an extra echo going on, then
ate1
would get you two of everything, and
ate0
would get you one. Not so. You always get one -- you can't turn echo off.

This, it turns out, was one of the things that was screwing up ppp.
Everything ppp sent was echoed. ppp indicated there was a loop. Made
sense, the packet dump always showed that what was sent, was received.

The hardware is a lippert frontrunner with phoenix bios (not for long!
Everytime I use a fuctory BIOS I remember why I hate them so much) and
it is really glitchy. I think linuxbios will fix this, but right now I
can't reliably boot the node -- it comes up and the keyboard controller
or something is glitching so badly that 9load thinks I'm typing lots of
garbage -- I can't type garbage that fast even when I CAN reach the
keyboard!

The second problem was related to this. I could not use 'ppp -u' mode on
the cpu'ed in window, for some reason. So I was doing this:
con -Rs /dev/eia0
ATDT10.0.0.1
^\
q
ppp ....

Well, I was not thinking: when I exited 'con', DTR dropped, the modem
reset, and, well, ppp ended up talkng to a modem in 'AT' mode again.

So, I went to the console, and did this:
  ip/ppp -ddddd -f -p /dev/eia0  -x /net.alt -b 115200 -u -c -C

and all then worked. Almost. I did a
bind /net.alt /net
and pinged over the modem, and it sorta seems to work, but I can't
unplug the enet cable ... I think bits like dns etc. are still using the
old /net (obviously) so unplugging the cable gives them trouble; but I
don't see why I can't unplug the enet and do ip/ping 68.35.123.144.

next step is to make this modem (airlink.com raven) the ONLY ip
interface ... but that's tomorrow.

To whoever wrote ppp, nice work! It's very nice to have a user-mode
program for PPP, and the debug mode really makes figuring things out
pretty straightforward and fast.

ron