Linux ISDN
How to Get Access to the Internet With Linux Over ISDN and synchronous PPP


This WWW pages tells you how to create easily a "leaf site" (a computer without permanent connection to the Internet), saving money, but very powerful.

Using a terminal program you can't do too much - you even could "telnet" to somewhere; and transferring binary data is somewhat difficult with it.

So we use a protocol allowing temporarily a full connection of our computer to the Internet: PPP (Point to Point Protocol). You get an own IP address while the connection is established. With this, you can use FTP or WWW browsers, for example.

Connections into the Internet cause bigger telephone bills, so we must do as much as possible "off line" - i.e. we should be able load down email and news, and read them after download without an active connection. This procedures are described here, too.

Requirements

General

You must have access to your provider. Please ask him what you need to connect to him.

These pages contain a database file (which currently is very small) with the data of some providers. If you can add an entry I would be very pleased.

Hardware

You need an ISDN card. The software described here supports Teles cards (Teles S0/16.0, /16.2 and S0/16.3) and their licenced copies by Creatix (16-S0) and Dr. Neuhaus (Niccy 1016). Also supported are cards by Thinking Objects (ICN cards) and the PCBIT cards by Octal (Portugal). A Creatix PnP card driver is in preparation.

Software

Described here is the "ISDN4Linux" ("i4l") package by Fritz Elfert here because of some practical reasons. Also available are some other packages like "UISDN" by Matthias Urlichs. Only i4l offers kernel internal drivers yet, however.

If you want to be told about the development of the i4l software you should subscribe to the isdn4linux mailing list (about 30 mails per day). Therefore you should send an email containing

  subscribe isdn4linux <your_own@email.address>
in the body to
  majordomo@hub-wue.franken.de
(no subject required). The folks talking there also speak English.


Copyright © (GPL V 2) 1996 Bernhard Hailer
Last modification: 31-Aug-96 BeH