Connection Troubleshooting

[ManBeast]

I have a feeling this may take a while to resolve but I hope many of you are able to help me. I am using RedHat 6.0 with KDE and am trying to dial in with kppp. In the process of connecting it gets to Initializing the Modem then simply hangs with no other errors. I was running Redhat 5.2 and was able to connect in this method easily. I've also tried pppd. I have a USR 56K Modem on COM2. I thank you in advance for any suggestions.

[ninjaz]

If kppp / chat is hangning, that's a problem with either not specifying the correct device for the modem, an IRQ conflict, no serial support in the kernel, or you've got a winmodem.

If you've got a winmodem, the answer is simple: You need to get a different modem.

If it's an IRQ conflict, you can tell by going: cat /proc/interrupts

Since your modem is on what MSDOS calls COM2, you should see an entry for serial there for IRQ 3. If there is more than one entry, that may be the problem. That can be corrected in newer machines by going into the BIOS at boot time and turning off unnecessary built-in comports (COM4 would be the conflicting one in this case).

Running dmesg should show you the serial ports detected. The one in question is ttyS1 - which is what you should tell your programs the modem is on (/dev/ttyS1) You may also want to check for a symlink of /dev/modem to see if that's pointing to the right spot if you happen to be using that as your modem device to the dial programs.

If you've compiled your own kernel, go back and check with make xconfig or make menuconfig (for either X or full-screen configuration options) to see if you've specified serial support. If you haven't, a quick way to get it working is to specify it as a module, then in the kernel source directory:
make modules ; make modules_install
depmod -a
insmod serial

For it to take effect after a reboot, put serial on a line in /etc/modules

Hope this helps.