Garry Garrett's Homepage

Connecting to Papillion Community Link with Solaris

I encountered a few difficulties connecting to my ISP, the Papillion Community Link with Solaris, so I thought I would share with others how I connect for their benefit.

First off, I used Mike Mann's excellent resource, Configuring Solaris 7 PPP. I highly recommend it. I don't, however, see any point in you reinventing the wheel, so all of the files that this document mentions editing, I have put into a file called papio1.tar.Z that is on my web page. Feel free to download it, and here is how you can use it:

• Download papio1.tar.Z . Perhaps you want to place it in /tmp for now. My intructions from here on out will assume this.
• Type cd / to change directories to the root directory. In the next step we will unload the files out of papio1.tar.Z. The only existing file that should get overwitten is /etc/uucp/Systems. Perhaps you will want to make a backup copy of this first, but if you have not edited this file, there is no reason to. If you would rather, you can type cd /tmp and put the files into there and manually move them to /etc.
• Type zcat /tmp/papio1.tar.Z | tar xvf -. This will place all the files in /etc for you. If you want to look before you leap replace the "x" in the tar command with a "t".
• If your existing /etc/asppp.cf does not match /etc/asppp.cf.original, then copy your existing /etc/asppp.cf to /etc/asppp.cf.original. (cp /etc/asppp.cf /etc/asppp.cf.original). Likewise, if your existing /etc/nsswitch.conf does not match /etc/nsswitch.conf.original, then copy it over too.
• Edit /etc/uucp/Systems and put in your username and password. The \s is very important; it must come between your first and last name or else the chat script will not work. I recommend that you start up OpenWindows (/usr/openwin/bin/openwin on the system console) and use /usr/openwin/bin/textedit to edit the files. You can then use CTRL-TAB to quickly fill in your username and password. My file is setup to use the 597-2066 phone number. If you want to use a different one than rename the one that you want to be "papio1" and rename the "papio1" line to be something else (I'll try to come up with something more sophisticated when I get a chance to read up on more about UUCP).
• You can now run /etc/dialup to dial into Papillion Community Link via PPP and when you are done, run /etc/hangup to hang up. (note: the FAQ above puts these files as /dialup and /hangup, but this worked better with my tar file to put them in /etc).

If you are not a Papillion Community Link user, you may still get some use out of these files in that I suspect that you may have to do something similar for any Galaticomm BBS that uses PPP. You may have to edit more files and fields in files than I have mentioned here. I really recommend looking at Configuring Solaris 7 PPP and editing your own files, but feel free to use my files as a guideline.