PPP, LAN and Newbie Frustration.

[Michael Vondung]

Henrik wrote:

> Not a lot of detailed help..sorry...I haven't setup a PPP
> connection >in a LONG time.

The good news is that in a year I'll relocate to an area where ADSL is
available. Until then I'm stuck in a beautiful but telecommunication-wise
terribly medieval area.

I received an e-mail from another list member, and with both his and your
thoughts I had enough pointers to read up more on the relevant topics. The
most important resource was the "FreeBSD Unleashed" book that came with a
very nice "for dummies" type of chapter about networking. ;) Here's a short
summary in case someone else has a similar problem and suffers the same lack
of knowledge as I did:

- Learned that ppp_enable="YES" in rc.conf results in FreeBSD establishing a
PPP connection at boot time. Unless otherwise configured in rc.conf, it'll
be in "auto mode" (connection on demand). If not specified, it will use the
"papchap" profile. ppp_profile=xxxx will cause it to use the xxxx profile.
It also uses the -nat option by default.

- Went to sysinstall and configured my ethernet card manually this time.
Managed to fill in the right values, amazingly enough.

- Got ahold of my ISPs name servers and put the IP addresses in the
resolv.conf.

- Figured out how to configure the LAN manually in XP, without the wizard
(right-click on the connection icon, "properties", highlight tcp-ip,
"properties" button). Put in the appropriate IP addresses, and that was
that. I also had to change the Internet settings to prevent that XP uses the
local ISDN adapter to establish a dial-up connection.

- The last step was the biggest obstacle. While the two machines could ping
each other, FreeBSD wouldn't forward the packets for "outside" systems.
After some digging around I learned that this is disabled by default. Adding
gateway_enable="YES" to rc.conf fixed this. A small thing, but took the most
time to solve.

In short, it works as desired. Broke through the wall, and quite happy with
myself. ;)

Cheers,
Michael