getting dialup networking to work on FC4

[Tim]

Hi,

I've been having fun and games (not) getting dialup networking to work
on Fedora Core 4.  I eventually got it working in what I consider a
dodgy manner, and would like to know if there's a proper solution.

Initially, I've just used FC4 as terminals behind a Red Hat 9.0 server.
It managed dial-up fine, the only messing around I remember having to do
was putting "/sbin" in front of "ifup ppp0" in the modemlights utility.
The "neat" program set up all the parameters needed for dialup quite
fine.

I recently updated that Red Hat 9.0 box to Fedora Core 4, and dial-up
wouldn't work.  I had to do all of the following:

I had to manually enter "ln -s /dev/ttyS0 /dev/modem" before I could
dial up.  I had to put that into "/etc/rc.local" so I didn't have to
type the command line after any reboots (the link disappears).

    (I gather there's a change in how /dev is going to be
    handled, but some understandable documentation is in
    need, and the GUI tool that created the modem settings
    really should have done the job for me properly, in
    the first place.)

So now I can, albeit awkwardly, dial up.  Onto the next step, making it
easy to connect and disconnect.

The modemlights utility didn't work because it wanted to bring up a ppp0
interface, and that's not how neat created the configuration (it named
if after the name of my ISP, e.g. Optus).  So I renamed my entries in
neat to ppp0 and ppp1, instead of my two ISPs.  But makes it hard to
work out what's what in the list of connections in neat.  I hadn't tried
changing the modemlights configuration to use my ISP name instead of
ppp0, I'd done more experimenting than I wanted to at the time, and
phone calls cost too much to make several just to try out all the
permutations.

The next step was getting internet connection sharing through it to the
rest of my LAN.  Try as I might I couldn't find any option in a GUI to
enable it.  Previously I'd used some kernel configuration tweaking GUI
to first start it, but I don't see anything similar.  I've also done hte
same thing, previously, by entering the following in a command line,
"echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward", but that doesn't survive a
reboot, and I've also put that line into the "/etc/rc.local" post
start-up script.

Is there some proper way to get /dev/modem set properly, differently
from what I did?  And is there some other proper way to enable IP
forwarding differently from what I did?  (Both using "/etc/rc.local".)

I don't mind doing it that way, though if there's a proper way, and this
turns out to be a kludge, I'd rather do it properly.

The interaction between modemlights and neat needs a bit of sorting out.
The way neat sets up configurations, by default, doesn't work with it.
And modemlights probably isn't the only thing that expects the
configuration to be called ppp0.

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