From owner-freebsd-isp Thu Jun 20 18:02:29 1996 Return-Path: owner-isp Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id SAA01224 for isp-outgoing; Thu, 20 Jun 1996 18:02:29 -0700 (PDT) Received: from brasil.moneng.mei.com (brasil.moneng.mei.com [151.186.109.160]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id SAA01214 for ; Thu, 20 Jun 1996 18:02:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from jgreco@localhost) by brasil.moneng.mei.com (8.7.Beta.1/8.7.Beta.1) id UAA29872; Thu, 20 Jun 1996 20:01:16 -0500 From: Joe Greco Message-Id: <199606210101.UAA29872@brasil.moneng.mei.com> Subject: Re: Automatic PPP-detecting getty and pppd!!! To: root@edmweb.com (Steve Reid) Date: Thu, 20 Jun 1996 20:01:16 -0500 (CDT) Cc: isp@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: from "Steve Reid" at Jun 20, 96 03:34:59 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] Content-Type: text Sender: owner-isp@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > Okay all of you who have been wanting a way to get around loading > > "Microsoft Dial Up Scripting" on your Windows 95 boxes... now FreeBSD > > can detect a PPP session inside getty, and deal with it appropriately! > > How is this different from simply setting /etc/ttys to run pppd instead > of getty? Does it give a login prompt to people who aren't using PPP? Yes. The way we configure systems here, people have traditionally logged in with "Plogin" for PPP logins, and "login" for regular logins. Due to some other old local magic, "regular logins" actually get forwarded off of the "terminal server" box and onto the "shell account" box. However, the interesting new technology is allowing everything to coexist :-) > If > my users don't want/need a login prompt, are there any advantages to > using the new getty instead of directly running pppd? By definition, most ISP's want to offer flexibility. Think about the following: you go to a customer's site. You desperately want to download winsock (or whatever) because the customer's copy is bad - or he hasn't ever been set up before. You have a rack of a hundred modems, all execing pppd out of ttys.. you get very frustrated because you didn't leave yourself (or your users) a path into the system when everything was not working right on the customer's end. Rule #1, engineer for scenarios other than the best case. Or.. think about that one damn Mac customer who has to have SLIP because his ancient crudware won't do PPP reliably... > Forgive me if this is a stupid or self-answering question. Only sort of ;-) In an ideal world, it's nice to run everything over the network (i.e. PPP). In the real world, that screws you too badly in some cases. By the way, you may wish to look at my pppd anyways. Your current pppd will not log people in utmp, I personally like being able to type "w" and see who/what is connected, and this pppd does that. It also validates the "expires" field in the passwd entry, so that if you use this BSD feature, it works for PPP too. Forward progress, ho! ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/546-7968