[plug] Debian newbie question re:permissions

[sol]

I've just migrated from SuSE to Debian and am settling in to the very 
different (from the rpm distros) world of .deb - and I like what I see. 
But I'm having some teething difficulties of an elementary sort.

One problem I haven't found a solution to in the manpages is with pon. I 
set it up with pppconfig and went to run it and got a permission denied 
for the modem which I promptly chmod'ed. Then I went to do this again 
and I got this:
/usr/sbin/pppd: Can't open options file /etc/ppp/options: Permission denied

So I tried chmod'ing this (to 711, then 744, then 777) and I'm still 
getting the same error. I'm a little confused because I thought that 
chmod was all that was needed to change permissions. I've also tried 
chown without success.
ls -l /etc/ppp/options gets:
-rwxrwxrwx    1 root    dialout    12872 Oct 14 17:38 /etc/ppp/options

I'm running pon as root which isn't such a good thing and I'd like to 
change it so that I can run pon as a regular user.

thanks heaps,

Sol