Stephen’s Scribble Pad

By Stephen 　http://smmeyer.com/scribble/?p=3

I have recently undergone the trials of getting my Sentech modem to work under Ubuntu. Sadly, the biggest cause of all my headaches was my own ignorance as a newbie to Linux.

Anyhow, the approach to getting things going comes courtesy of the Neology site (here). However I was unable to get this to work under Ubuntu 6.10. My connection worked fine under Windows XP.

While searching further I came accross a Forum entry in Neology where advice was given regards chap-secrets (here) and lo and behold there was a chat script shown with an extra line statememt: ATS7=30. This has to do with waiting for a call. The full chat script provided by rodent is shown below.

TIMEOUT 30
ABORT "NO CARRIER"
ABORT "BUSY"
ECHO ON
SAY "Dialling sentech...\n"
"" \rAT
"OK-+++\c-OK" ATH0
OK ATZ
OK ATS7=30
OK AT+CGDCONT=1,"PPP","sentech.co.za","username,password",0,0
OK ATD*99#
SAY "Waiting up to 2 minutes for connection ... "
CONNECT ""
SAY "Connected..."

At roughly the same time I got in touch with a very kind fellow (Ehsan Akhgari) who gave me some valuable pointers. He advised me to look into my XP temp directory for a file called IPWReg.log This file was created because the XP drivers run in Debug mode and log each connection. There I was able to see the connection syntax used by the XP driver including the correct user name and password.

In the chat script above, replace **username** and **password** with the user name and password exactly as shown in IPWReg.log.

This should do the trick. I notice that I need to reset the modem (switch it on and off) and stop pppd (using poff pppd) if my connection fails.