pppoeconf

Yesterday, for the very first time I used PPPOE to connect to the Internet. My friend Phil, the Economic Development Officer for Perenjori, is getting started with Ubuntu, but could not get onto the Internet. So yesterday I went round to his place to see if I could help (and they very kindly provided lunch). Phil is on the town wireless network, and there is an ethernet cable coming out of the ceiling straight into the PC's Ethernet socket.

I tested Puppy 4.00 and using our somewhat primitive frontend to the Roaring Penguin utilities I was able to make a connection. Except for that problem where /etc/ppp/resolv.conf and /etc/resolv.conf became symlinks to each other. I reversed the original arrangement, made /etc/resolv.conf a symlink to /etc/ppp/resolv.conf, the latter being a normal file, and we were in business.

Then we tackled Ubuntu. Oh no, first we tried Windows XP, as Phil had recently reinstalled it and it wasn't setup -- oh what a ratsnest of paths we followed, trying to setup PPPOE! Eventually we phoned BBNet tech support and they walked us through it.

Then we got onto Ubuntu. Phil had some prior information that we should open a terminal window and run 'sudo pppoeconf'. That was a very pleasant experience indeed and we were quickly online.

So what is this 'pppoeconf'? It's a great little script, that uses Xdialog for the GUI. What really interested me is that it can use the 'ppp' package only (as that now has pppoe capability) and the Roaring Penguin utilities are not required.
I hacked the 'pppoeconf' script a bit to get it to work in Puppy, but as I'm home now I can't test it. I only get through the first couple of dialog windows. Anyone interested in testing it? I have made it into a PET package, 'pppoeconf_pup-1.17' and uploaded to here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/test/unipup-alpha1/
(nothing to do with UniPup, that was just a convenient place to upload to)

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