Please everyone! The advice to use minicom or seyon is of course good. Recognize however that with at least some ISPs that use CHAP, you can be mislead by the results that you see with a term program.
The problem is that some ISPs are monitoring the port such that a carriage return (or newline) character wakes up a getty (and thus blocks ppp until either logoff or timeout). Thus for some ISPs, there is NO "login/username & password" type sequence prior to ppp starting up. To connect to this sort of ISP then one just exits the chat-script after the connect message from the modem (of course the CHAP secrets file must be set up -- or maybe PAP). Some common problems... Enabling the "auth" /etc/ppp/options in the bo distribution (note that the default for this is now 'set' and should not be changed in the options file (for hamm). NOT disabling "auth" with "noauth" in the ppp/providers file ('Auth' makes your machine _require_ your provider to authenticate itself with you--most will not). The ppp connection can sometimes not startup if the chat-script exits too quickly (ie: ppp tries to start before the modem's connect message has been completely received). I don't remember the fix that I saw for this but setting the modem's connect report to just be the word 'connect' would probably work (I also don't understand why ppp doesn't recover from this problem on its' own unless maybe the outgoing ppp data is forcing the modem to stay in command mode). -- best, -bill [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] from a 1996 Micro$loth ad campaign: "The less you know about computers the more you want Micro$oft!" See! They do get some things right! -- E-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST. Trouble? E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .