On Sat, 2 Aug 2008, Henry W. Peters wrote:
Well, good news, I got my Robotics modem (Re: Fwd: kernel 2.6.25 serial port bug [continued]) to connect with the Internet... thanks to the good eye & patience of Mr. Marvin Stodolsky, only problem now, is that the desktop connect menu will not connect, I have to dial-up via the terminal (sudo wvdial), & the main problem there is that I do not know the command for hanging-up! Shutting down to hang up (the desktop dial-up/disconnect does not work there either, & does not indicate there is a network connection, when there is one) seems rather graceless (among other things).
Since I'm not familiar with wvdial, I had to look up what it does beyond the dialing bit that I gathered from the name. Looks like you can just send pppd a signal and it will down the link. Something like 'pkill pppd' with the appropriate rooty privs. 'kill -SIGTERM `pidof pppd`' if you're not fortunate enough to be in possesion of the covetted 'pkill'. Note some shells have an odd built-in version of 'kill' that will complain about using something like -SIGTERM and will actually want '-TERM' instead. Give the full path to your system kill to avoid that (/bin/kill) or prefix like \kill also works for some shells.
& I do think I have the "Network" panel set up correctly, but not absolutely sure about this... I did do something to stop the modem from dialing & trying to connect, before I even logged in... but I have no idea what it was, it just stopped doing it.
These things are usually just front-ends for the real commands. They generally read a config file, and do what's in the file when you click some part of the menu/control. Try to find if it has such a file, and edit it to contain the right commands. Any manpage/docs the thing might have could be of help here. It might even have a special configuration screen. I have a program gkrellmd that works like that for its PPP up/down commands.
