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On moving to a new Internet provider.

I moved to a new Internet provider today. These guys provide Internet connectivity via PPP over Ethernet. The same old story repeated itself:

Location: Dingy, cramped cableguy’s office. 6:30 PM.

Me: …so this connection of yours requires a connection tool?

Cocky ISP guy: Oh, yes, very attractive, animated wizard. We’ll only need to insert one driver, this raspppoe.inf. Sampat here (pointing to grubby, skinnny gum-chewing teenager) will guide you through the entire setup process! You don’t need to do a thing…

Me: So this thing is a Windows application? (redundant question, and I had no intention of allowing Sampat fifty feet near my apartment.)

CIG (with a look that said “Where’re you from – Mars?”): Well, yes… but all Windows versions! 95, 98, 2000, XP, NT, even Windows Server 2003! What do you have installed?

Me: SUSE Linux 9.2 Professional.

CIG: Ohh… Linux. (actually: “You #$^$#^&@%, why can’t you be normal?”)

Me: Yeah, but does your service have a web-based authentication interface? Or is there a Java-based client I can use? Then I won’t have a problem.

This conversation was already beginning to push the limits of his technical knowledge.

CIG: Umm… you want to take a look and find out for yourself? (actually: You $#%#$%&^&, why don’t you just go to ^%&^%&%*%$^ hell?)

I looked, and quickly concluded that this was PPP over Ethernet.

Me: OK. I guess I can handle this one. Just give me my user name and password, and I’ll get going. (I already had a LAN connection to the cableguy’s office, which would work.)

CIG: Sure! Cool! If you have any problems, do let me k… umm, on the other hand, seeya!

I could almost feel his hateful gaze burning into my back as I walked out the office. We Linux users are a pain to most normal people anywhere in the world. Sharing files? Oh, wait… I gotta get Samba working. Hey – why can’t you see my Yahoo! Albums invitation? What? You’re using GAIM? What in the dickens is that? Hey – why can’t you see my webcam? GAIM again? You freak! And now the cableguy.

Now to find a nice graphical tool for Fedora Core 2, so my parents don’t have to open up a terminal window and type more text than the email they want to send.

I didn’t remember seeing a graphical tool for any Linux distribution for configuring a pppoe connection. My parents’ computer has Fedora Core 2 installed, my ThinkPad has SUSE Linux 9.2. No amount of search on Google for a graphical front-end to pppoe on FC2 yielded any results. For SUSE, I didn’t even have to search. YAST is the answer to all your problems. YAST can do everything for a hacker except find him/her a date. (And with Nat Friedman et al at work at Novell, it’ll be able to do that as well.) After configuring your PPPoE connection through YAST, KInternet is a nice application that sits in your system tray and offers you nice context menu options like “Dial in” and “Hang up”. Cool! Just what I want!

I’ll be installing SUSE 9.2 Pro on my parents’ computer next weekend for sure! That’ll sever my last link with Red Hat-based computers.


February 20, 2005 ·  Post to Twitter ·  Email this ·  Internet, Linux, Off-Topic ·  Leave a Comment


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