Gee, an engineer that knows less about Linux (or at least certain aspects of it) than me. Welcome aboard! Prepare for frustration . . .
First, let me interject on Ray's behalf that you have not given us enough information to help you with your problem (hey, I think I'm getting the hang of this!). But, seriously: what dialer program are you using and/or what graphical frontend? I know of a couple of different dialing programs for Linux, but I can't remember the name of either at the moment :(. Maybe information about that would be helpful to those here who could offer some constructive advice. Anyway, what I would point out on a perhaps more fundamental level is that I understand you to have 2 basic tasks in your request. Maybe you're not separating them conceptually, but I see you as needing to: 1) set up something like dial-on-demand; which has a related problem that you've run into - 2) dialing program permissions. I think most Linuces come with their dialing programs belonging to root only. As I understand this, the ways to deal with the inconvenience of having to su every time you want to dial the 'net are: 1) set up a "dialers" or "ppp" group into which you place users who are allowed to dial the 'net on your system; 2) change the permissions on the dialing program. I used option 2. I accomplished this by su'ing and issuing the command "chmod 4745 /usr/bin/kppp". As you may note, I'm running the graphical frontend Kppp (part of the KDE desktop environment) as my dialing program. This allows most users to invoke the dialer on my system (I'm virtually the only user). I suppose in situations where more people use a particular computer, it might be wiser to use method 1 to give those users dialer/'net access. I'll have to let others describe how to best do that, since I'm still a bit vague on user administration under Linux. As for making the dialer dial when outside packets are requested, I'll have to leave that to others to address. I'd like to get that working on my system as well, but have just not had the time to tackle it yet. I'd have to do some studying to say anything meaningful on that topic. Ah, the things we used to do so simply under M$Win! But those days are forever behind us now . . . ? James - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs