The

User's Manual

Appendix A: Preparations



We recommend you doing some preparations before first starting kISDN to avoid the typical beginner's mistakes:

  • Make backup copies of some files on your system (kISDN will overwrite them without asking you)
  • Make sure that ISDN was not installed on your system before (this will cause strange errors we know from supposed bug reports)
  • Check the version number of your ipppd


Backup copies

Whenever you start kISDN's dialup client, kisdn, 3 files will be read and buffered and then written back with a different content to match the setup for the chosen provider; in the best case the previously buffered files will be restored when quitting kisdn, but there is no guarantee that the program will always do a clean quit and thus those files may - in some bad situation - be corrupted.
The files we recommend making backup copies of are
    /etc/resolv.conf
    /etc/ppp/pap-secrets
    /etc/chap/secrets
    /etc/ppp/ioptions
Yes, that's correct we're talking about 4 instead of 3 files, which depends on the fact, whether you have providers with different authentification protocols (one using PAP, the other using CHAP).
To easy recognize your backup files we recommend choosing the following names:
    /etc/resolv.conf.bak
    /etc/ppp/pap-secrets.bak
    /etc/ppp/chap-secrets.bak
    /etc/ppp/ioptions.bak
If one or even more of these files don't exist on your machine, don't bother: In that case kISDN will create it/them on runtime.


ISDN already installed (kISDN was not used)

In case you already have a working ISDN setup (without using kISDN) you most probably have some mechanism installed in your boot scripts (ISDN start/stop scripts and the like). The dialup client kisdn will detect PPP and ISDN interfaces at startup and you may even trigger dialout/hangup on those, but you will not be able to use the full functionality of kISDN with them; the reason for this is, that kISDN does not have enough information on those interfaces. If you really need to rely on those preconfigured interfaces (that's how we call them), please make sure the ipppd is running, too (PPP interfaces only) since kISDN can't start it in that case.
The most obvious reason for preconfigured interfaces is the need of a working ISDN setup without running X, and thus we're already preparing a commandline solution of kISDN that will cover these cases.


Version checking of the ipppd

The actual (I didn't say most recent) version of the ipppd (i2.2.9) is no longer using the file
    /etc/ppp/options
but instead
    /etc/ppp/ioptions
is looked for. If you have a somewhat older ipppd running on your system we recommend creation of a symbolic link, such as
    ln -s ioptions options
since kISDN will write data to ioptions by default and your ipppd won't find it. To get information about the version number of your ipppd, simply start it by hand and give it an illegal option, such as
    ipppd -h
The ipppd should respond as
    ipppd: unrecognized option '-h'
    ipppd version i2.2 patch level 9anubis
(and you will learn about it's usage - don't bother).

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T. Westheider / October 17th, 1998 - kISDN Release 0.7.0