[TriLUG] ___ at mindspring.com____

[Tom Bryan]

On Sunday 28 October 2001 11:01 am, you wrote:

> Once that's done, then it *should* be a small matter of setting up your
> dialup connection to Mindspring. Here's a handy little bit of instruction;
> it looks pretty useful to me:
>
> http://www.help.mindspring.com/modules/00000/00006.htm

Like I said, although they don't officially support Linux, I always found 
Mindspring's searchable help to be very useful.  

That said, these days, RedHat (and presumably other vendors) provides tools 
for configuring your dialup access.  RedHat's tool is called rp3-config, and 
the dialer is called rp3.  The rp3-config program will attempt to auto-detect 
the modem.  You can still fill out the GUI by hand if it doesn't find the 
modem.  Use ttyS0 for COM1, for example.  Then, fill out the info for dialing 
the ISP.  You can debug the connection from rp3-config.  It'll attempt to 
dial out and show you some output from the process, such as the communication 
between your machine and the ISP's machine.  When you connect to your ISP, 
rp3 will add entries to your routing table, resolv.conf file, and ipchains 
rules.  It was explained very clearly even for a newbie in one of the books 
that came with the RedHat boxed set.  

Now, since he's on Mandrake, I'm not sure that the same tools are available.  
I suspect that there's something equivalently easy.  I recommend scanning the 
Mandrake documentation before reading (more general) HOWTOs.  The HOWTOs are 
generally pretty good no matter what distribution you're using, but if 
Mandrake has provided you with a simple GUI to configure everything 
correctly, then you might as well use it.  That's part of the purpose of the 
Linux distributors: value-added utilities.  Of course, those value-adds are 
often vendor-specific, so you have to check that vendor's docs first.

Good luck,
---Tom