[SLUG] RH PPP Dialer Badness

[<james@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Useless RH Dialer in RH 7.0. I've just emerged cut, bruised and bleeding
from a hair raising upgrade and have a temporary modem until the one I
ordered arrives. It's an external 33.6 sitting on my parallel port. It can
plug into either the parallel or serial port. The Dialup Configuration tool
in RH 7.0 reports the modem on TTYS0.

I've never had this before: I attempt to bring up the interface to dial into
my ISP and I get a loud beep of protest and an error dialogue saying it
failed to activate the interface. No descriptive error message or anything,
just a useless error dialogue.

When I use the debug button to dial, it dials OK and I see it sending my
username and password, no problems there. But then, every ping I try fails
and Netscape complains it cannot find anything for whatever reason. Don't
know and I don't f*ing care. I'm really getting tired of this. Thinking of
throwing computer out window and never using a computer again.

Anybody got any ideas? Should I plug the modem into the serial port? If so
why should this make a positive difference? Means I have to unplug my
printer. What a pain in the arse.

BTW, this old external 33.6K modem kicks butt. It flogs the shit out of my
old internal 56K modem. I wonder if this is because it hardware/firmware
decodes instead of software. Hmm. Anyway it downloads @ 56K or better too,
most of the time. It also reports (can see in CONNECT command) that it
CONNECTs at 115K. Interesting.

James