This is a rough start at answering some FAQ's for diald.

1) Diald starts up pppd, but pppd hangs without finishing the connection.

   There might be several reasons for this. The common ones are:

   (a) your remote machine may expect you to tell it your IP address,
      ( and perhaps even it's address!)
       In this case you must make sure you pass pppd an option
       to deal with this. e.g., end your diald options with something like

       --- 129.2.33.1:129.2.33.4

   (b) When pppd starts up it tries to do a gethostid(). If your system
       is set up in such a way as to cause this to require a name server
       lookup, then pppd will lock waiting for the name server to answer.
       (The reasons this doesn't happen when diald is not running is that
       a name server request would find the network unreachable when
       diald is not running, but when diald is running the network
       is reachable via diald's proxy route!)

2) Diald brings up the link fine, but it won't time out.

   There can be two reasons for this. Either you've defined filter
   rules that make hard to time out, or something is sending packets
   down the link.
   (Talk about how to monitor packets).

3) Diald fails when reading the /etc/diald.conf line with tcp.www in it.

   Your /etc/services file doesn't define www services.
   Get a new /etc/services file or comment out that line in your
   /etc/diald.conf.

4) Can I run diald together with a slip or ppp server?
   [i.e. How do I let people call in on the same line I use for diald?]

   Use file locking. You need to use a getty that does file locking.
   uugetty or mgetty both do this.
   Your slip or ppp server should be started via getty.

5) I want to have mail addressed to my site delivered to me.

   You need to set up a cron job that tries to fetch mail regularly.
   Consult a sendmail/smail guru.

6) Can I make diald connect at fixed times so I can deliver mail or
   do other jobs?

   Sure. Just have a cron job start the job. Diald should try to
   connect as usual...

7) I started up diald in ppp mode, but it didn't run pppd, but it
   did start a SLIP connection. What did I do wrong.

   Nothing. Diald doesn't start pppd until it needs to establish
   the physical connection to the remote site. It does however
   always establish a SLIP connection that it uses to monitor
   outgoing traffic so it can decide when to bring up the link.

8) I started up diald in ppp mode, and now I'm getting permission
   errors in my system logs, and ppp won't connect.

   You specified a device in your ppp options file. Don't.
