[plug] David's ADSL Problem

[Cameron Patrick]

Harry McNally wrote:

> The Computer Angels computer has a litte GUI program that Cameron wrote 
> which makes selecting dial-up or bradband internet very easy.

When it works :-)  (Which has admittedly been every time I've tried it,
and the "broadband" setting has received rather more testing than the
dial-up option on account of me not having dial-up, but having other
people using something is a great way of finding unreproducible bugs.)

It's just a little GTK wrapper that writes /etc/network/interfaces and
calls ifup/ifdown to do the real work, and it obviously won't work if
your ethernet card wasn't detected properly, and doesn't gracefully
handle the case of having multiple network interfaces.  However if (as I
presume) David has a Computer Angels computer, none of this should be an
issue.

> [0] For PLUGers, for our ADSL connection we are relying on all the 
> modems being set-up to handle the ppoOE/A, authentication, and hand out 
> IP using DHCP. We haven't found any ISPs yet who expect the PC to do 
> pppOE. If any do, please tell us so we can recommend an alternative 
> provider.

This isn't an ISP issue, it's a modem/router issue.  Just about any
cheap ADSL modem/router will do its own PPPoE these days, and while it's
certainly the "non-geek" solution it's still the one I use at home :-)

Cameron