Re: UNIX and ease of use
On Wed, Mar 04, 1998 at 02:14:50PM -0600, john@dhh.gt.org wrote:
> Avery writes:
> > Adam P. Harris wrote:
> > >WvDial is very clever, but it and most of its competitors bypass the
> > >standard configuration files. This locks the user into their system and
> > >pretty much rules out manual editing if the 'EZ' system fails.
>
> Actually, I wrote that.
Yeah, sorry. My brain knew that but my fingers were working on their own :)
> > The PPP protocol manager should be run from the program that does the
> > modem initialization and dialing, not the other way around.
>
> I would rather see it act like a real daemon. It would read a config file
> at startup, create the designated ppp devices, monitor them for traffic,
> and bring connections up and down as required. That's not going to happen,
> though, so I'm trying to live with the standard (the Debian one, not the
> Slackware one with all it's wacky scripts).
Hmm, that sounds like diald or request-route to me. I haven't tried pppd's
internal dial-on-demand, but it sounds like they're aiming for approximately
what you suggest.
> > What's wrong with diald for demand-dialing, anyway?
>
> It looks like an ugly kludge, but I've never tried it.
You can look at it from several directions. It is partly a kludge, in that
it has to decode TCP/UDP/IP headers all by itself when the kernel has
already done so. On the other hand, since it has the information anyway it
can do some very cool stuff and make smart decisions. For example, the
fin/ack/reset part of a connection really isn't a good reason to bring the
link up -- only a nameserver request or a new TCP connection makes it
worthwhile.
> It is my impression that bizarre chat authentication procedures are dying
> out and being replaced by PAP, CHAP, and sometimes MSCHAP. Modems are, as
> you note, already standardized.
Yup. One pleasant side effect of Win95's completely braindead dialer is
that more and more ISPs are changing their servers to match. Still, though,
there are plenty of servers out there that don't yet do PAP or CHAP, and we
don't want to ignore them like Microsoft did.
Have fun,
Avery
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