PPP, LAN and Newbie Frustration.

[Michael Vondung]

Hello!

This is my third month with FreeBSD, and while so far everything worked
mostly fine, I think I now hit a wall. Hard. Please note that I lack Unix
and networking background, so expect me to sound embarrassingly amateurish.

The current situation:

Over the past few weeks I used a network consisting of two machines. Machine
A is a Window XP Pro system with a dial-up connection to my ISP. Machine B
is a FreeBSD 4.8 system that shares XP's internet connection when available.
This was easy enough to set up: I used the idiot-proof "set up a network"
wizard in XP and enabled "Internet Connection Sharing", and in FreeBSD I let
Sysinstall DHCP-configure the Ethernet card. This works flawlessly.

However, this isn't what I really want. It makes little sense for the
FreeBSD box to run local IMAP and NTTP servers, connect through the XP box
to the net, and then serves mail and news to the very same XP machine. It's
just not pretty or efficient, since it requires me to have the workstation
running 24/7, too.

The goal:

I'd like the FreeBSD to connect to the 'net, using a PPP dial-up connection,
and the XP box to share the (dial-up) Internet connection of the FreeBSD
machine.

So, yesterday I plugged an old, external ISDN modem into the FreeBSD
machine. It took me a while to get PPP working (with the help of a kind
freebsd-questions soul), but it eventually did work. It connects to the ISP,
and it will also use this connection, but ONLY if the XP machine is also
"there" (even if not connected). If the XP machine is turned off or the LAN
interrupted, the FreeBSD box will not use its own Internet connection. (I
suspect it has to do with resolv.conf listing the XP machine's internal IP
address as nameserver? If I remove this, FreeBSD still can't resolve
addresses, even though ppp.conf has "enable dns".)

Roughly, what I'd like is this:

Have the FreeBSD box connect to the Internet via PPP (dial-up) whenever an
application on either the FreeBSD box *or* the Windows box requires a
connection to the Internet, and disconnect when it's been idle for a while
(I know how to set *this* in ppp.conf, but that's pretty much all I know).
I'd like the FreeBSD system to "internally" use 192.168.0.1 and the XP box
192.168.0.2.

Some of the problems:

- I get a dynamic IP address whenever I connect to the ISP and I don't know
this address before I connect.

- I do not have a local DNS/nameserver. I understand that I can set one up
locally, but that I would need my ISPs nameserver IP for this. Also, how
would this help me if the host configuration is done before a PPP connection
is established? Ideally, in addition, I'd like to use different ISPs.

- I am uncertain if it is all right that the host names of these two
machines are "fictive". With the old setup, both use "<system>.mshome.net"
(something Windows assigns, I didn't choose this.) Is it acceptable to use
something "made up"? (Let's say I own example.org and name the boxes
freebsd.example.org and xp.example.org, would this be all right even though
the machines have 192.x.x.x IP addresses and don't "really" exist as far as
the outside world is concerned?)

- I noticed that after setting up PPP, FreeBSD will automatically establish
a PPP connection at boot time. It will only use the "papchap" configuration,
and fail if I rename this entry. The problem is that the only change I made
to anything but /etc/ppp/ppp.conf is that I added ppp_enable=YES to
/etc/rc.conf. Where does it get the idea from to use the papchap entry in
ppp.conf?

- I am in the dark when it comes to configuring the XP side. This is
off-topic here, but if anyone has an idea, I'd be grateful for the
assistance. The wizard allows for two "modes": XP being the machine
connecting to the 'net, and XP using another machine's connection. It
doesn't actually ask for any IP addresses, or lets me assign any IP
addresses (it picks 169.x.x.x for itself when I make it a "client"). How
does one configure this manually? (I never thought I'd see the day where I
actually *want* textual configuration files -- but three months with FreeBSD
changed this fundamentally.)

- To make matters worse, I don't really understand what netstat tells me, or
how to draw any conclusions from the information it provides. I did read the
man pages for netstat, PPP and so on, but frankly, it's over my head. I
know, I must sound pathetically helpless here. Rest assured, I feel exactly
this way, too! :)

What am I looking for?

Ideally, for easy-to-understand, step-by-step instructions! Seriously
though, I've tried the entire morning and afternoon to figure this out, but
it's clearly out of my scope. It is a pitiful experience to read
documentation and not understand it. I don't know which files to edit (on
the FreeBSD side), and how to set up everything to work as outlined above.

The future:

If/when I get this to work, I'll add a second 80GB disk to the XP machine
and put FreeBSD on it, and then dual-boot. The current FreeBSD box would
continue to connect to the internet and happily serve the workstation,
whether it's running XP or FreeBSD. (I'll probably need help with setting up
FreeBSD on the workstation too, but for now I'd be thrilled if FreeBSD/XP
worked nicely together.)

If there is any information I can provide, please let me know what is
needed.

I do realise that I'm asking for quite a bit of help here, but I think it
beats giving up or turning to one of the easy-to-setup Linux distros (I like
-this- community and -this- OS).

My sincere thanks in advance.

Cheers,
Michael