Re: (ASCEND) Ascend 4048 with UNIX dial-up: How to?

[Mike Jackson <mhjack@tscnet.com>]

On Wed, 6 Jan 1999, Steve M. Fabac, Jr. wrote:

> I was asked to assist a client in converting his Windows based E-Mail to
> using his UNIX system to send and receive mail from his ISP. Presently
> he uses a Windows 95 system to connect to the ISP and retrieve his
> e-mail.
> ...
> The technician recommended that I "enable PAP" on my end but was totally
> confused with the idea of logging in and then starting ppp (as in is
> common on SCO: Login: nppp <CR> Password: whatever). The technician
> indicated that they has several UNIX clients with full-time ISDN
> connections and I asked him for phone numbers for the clients so that
> I could obtain information on their configurations. Since this was late
> on Thursday afternoon, he was unable to supply the information.

Actually, the ISP's technician is correct...  Here is what the Ascend box
is doing...

Once the modems have established carrier, the Ascend box starts looking
for Link Control Protocal (LCP) packets.  It doens't send any, it just
looks for them.  If your end sends LCP packets then PPP must be running on
your end and the Ascend box then sends LCP packets and a PPP session is
negociated.  The Ascend box will expect your box to use the Password
Authentication Protocol (PAP) to send your username and password.

Once the Ascend box has the username/password, it will authenticate using
the ISP's radius server.

The trick to getting a Unix machine to connect to this is to terminate
your script (usually a program called chat) as soon as the 'CONNECT'
string is seen from the modem.  You pppd program will then be run, and it
has to be told to use PAP and where to get the username/password pair for
that system (usually a pap-secrets file or another file in /etc) --
Consult your documentation for that.

Also, since you are truing to retreive mail there are several methods for
that as well:

	1. Use a Unix POP client (fine for a single mailbox)
	2. Use a program like fetchmail
	3. Have a mailserver running on the Unix box with an MX record of
           10 and another machine on the net all the time with a
           preference of 20.  The always on machine would receive and
           spool the mail for the site, and then you would dial-in with
           the primary mailserver and issue the ETRN command to the
           secondary so that it knows to despool the mail.
	4. Be connected all the time and have mail sent directly to the
           machine.

Hope that helps..

					Mike Jackson
					TSCNet


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