I figured I'd chime in here with the results of my experiences, in the
nature of a reply (really an adjunct) to Bill's excellent advice.

>>
>> Hey folks, I am having major problems getting on the internet from netbsd.
>> I've tried pppsetup.tgz... and i spend 2 soild days trying to get it to
>> work... is there any other software package I can use??
>
>Rather than give up, why not get us to try and help you get it running?
>
>Those scripts are basically the ones I am using right now. They do
>work. Though they are more sophisticated than other working scripts,
>they should be just as easy (or hard) to configure as the part you
>have to configure is the same in each one.
>
>I'm going to get soap-boxy as a number of folks are having problems.
>
>You have to provide two things: the modem intialization string, and
>how to get into your ISP. Both of these things will go into
>the chat script.
>
>The chat script is a set of see-say pairs. chat looks for the first
>thing, then says the next thing. If it looks for a "" item, it
>just goes ahead and says the next thing.
>

Here I had an annoying problem.  I have two ISPs - Mindspring (hooray!) and
Earthlnk (so-so).  I could get NetBSD online consistently with EL but not
with MS.  So I logged into MS with a terminal window in Open Transport.

Here was the problem:

The ppp scripts I had dl'd assumed that the ppp server would print
"CONNECT" upon connect and wait for a CR (the chatscript included ' CONNECT
""').  But the MS ppp server didn't do this - it just proceeded to the
login prompt.  pppd (or chat - whatever) apparently sat around and waited
for "CONNECT", which never happened.  When I removed this line from the ppp
chatscript, everything worked perfectly.

Advice:  login to your ppp server with a terminal window in OT (or MacPPP
or whatever) and see what happens.  Compare this to your chatscript.


>If your ISP supports ppp under MacOS, STEAL ITS CONFIGURATION!!!!!!!!
>The ATXXX string in ppp.setup.tgz was stolen right out of my copy of MacSLIP.
>Your modem will probably want something else.
>

I tried this.  It didn't work.  God knows why not.  (After all, its string
works fine with OT). Here's another approach:

Use the dial-up terminal emulator program that came with your modem to
steal its string.  (Just set the terminal emulator to local echo and dial
some number - I used my own home number [busy signal - who cares]. The
string should appear in the terminal window.)


>My ISP (Stanford) has a fairly simple setup. You dial in, enter your
>login name, then your password. Then you type ppp, and away you go.
>
>I do not know what your ISP wants. But the chat script needs to do what
>they want, not what Stanford wants.
>
>If you have ppp up under MacOS, look at that chat script. No, copy it.
>Chat scripts are chat scripts.
>
>If you are having chat script problems, I've pulled Paul Goyette's debug
>helpter out of the demand-dial ppp kit, and put it in ftp://ftp.macbsd.com/
>pub/NetBSD/contrib/ppp-setup and it's the ppp-debug file. There's a
>readme. Run it, then try ppp. All the stuff chat sends and sees will
>go to the console. Or you can change the /dev/console phrase in the 11th
>line (echo "local2.*   /dev/console") to some file, say /var/log/info.
>Then everything will go to that file (you might have to "touch /var/log/info"
>first, though).
>
>Now you should be able to see what's going wrong. Assuming it's the
>chat script.
>
>Take care,
>
>Bill