On Thu, 16 Nov 2000, Marcelo Chiapparini wrote: > I am running a fresh debian machine as a single user. When I try to > connect to my ISP through wvdial or pon from my personal account I get a > message complaining that I have no privilege to do the operation, I should > be root to do it. I don't want to log as root each time I need the > connection. How should I define the right privileges in order to run > wvdial or pon from my personal account?
You need to have permissions to read and write the modem device (ttyS0, ttyS1, or whatever). If you check, $ ls -l /dev/ttyS* crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 64 Nov 12 20:41 /dev/ttyS0 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 65 Oct 15 12:42 /dev/ttyS1 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 66 Jul 5 13:44 /dev/ttyS2 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 67 Jul 5 13:44 /dev/ttyS3 you see that adding yourself to the "dialout" group does the job; so, issue the command # adduser myusername dialout and you should be OK (although some say it's a questionable security practice to give a regular user these kind of permissions). However, I've found that pppd, for some reason, occasionally changes the permissions of the modem device to crw-r----, and every time that happens you have to su to root and chmod g+w /dev/ttyS0, which gets tiresome. So I've switched to using pon and poff, and I've since had no problems. Just run "pppconfig" as route, and forget about wvdial, and you'll be happy.---Bruce F.
