net access under Linux progress and questions

[Charles Hallenbeck]

Good morning, Greg -

Let me try a couple of suggestions. First, to implement "demand
dialing," you must add a line to your /etc/ppp/options.demand file. After
the line that says "demand" you add a line that says "idle nnn" where nnn
is how many seconds to wait before automatically disconnecting. You might
try 600 for instance. Then as root you run the command "ppp -d" and you
are in business. I put that command in my startup script
"/etc/rc.d/rc.local" which only runs once at system startup.

To use fetchmail to retrieve your mail, you need a file called
".fetchmailrc" in your home directory with permissions 600. You can do
many tricky things with that configuration file, but here is a copy of
mine, which is quite simple. I have replaced my actual password with
number signs:

poll mail.mhonline.net protocol pop3
user chuckh password ######
fetchall


To simplify my own use, I have created a symbolic link called
"fm" pointing to the "fetchmail" script, but that is just laziness here!

As for sending mail, if you use the stock sendmail configuration without
any changes, you will have to ask your mail program to do some addressing
for you. What I do is operate from a user account with the same name as my
email account, and my local domain has the same name as my ISP domain. You
have to tell your mail program what yhour user domain name should be, and
also tell it to use only your domain name, not your host name. Pine has
settings for those choices.

Hope this much gets hyou started.

Chuck



 My
web site is
http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh The Moon is Waning Gibbous (52% of Full)