Dialing UUNet

I learned how to dial UUNet from a laptop just in time to be told that my company is going to stop using the service for dial-in purposes. However, I thought it might be useful to document the process here, in case anyone else might find themselves in the same position of needing to do this. It wasn’t trivial, and it took me many test dialups before I got it right.

In this documentation, remember that “~user” is standard sharthand for your user’s home directory. For instance, for me, this would translate to /home/kriderde.

First, I made a file called ~user/connect.sh. In that file is one line like this:

/usr/sbin/pppd /dev/modem 57600 file ~user/options

Then I made the options file, ~user/options. It includes these lines:

nodetach
ipcp-accept-local
ipcp-accept-remote
defaultroute
usepeerdns
user <domain><username>
lock
crtscts
asyncmap 0x0
mru 576
mtu 576
init ~user/dial.sh

Then you need to construct the dialup script, ~user/dial.sh, which looks like this:

/usr/sbin/chat -v -f ~user/chat.scr

Then you need to create the chat script, ~user/chat.scr, which contains:

ABORT   'BUSY'
ABORT   'NO CARRIER'
ATZ OK      ATD<your local POP number>
CONNECT  ame:    <your UUNet account number>
UIC:    <your UUNet username>
ord:    <your UUNet password>

This will get you connected to your UUNet account, but you’ll also need to get authenticated against your company’s domain. Finally, as root, you’ll need to edit /etc/ppp/pap-secrets. You’ll probably need to prepend the domain to the username. The format looks like this:

<domain><username> * <password>

NOTE: This username needs to match the “user” parameter in the pppd options file!

What a mess, huh? (Real geeks say that’s half the fun!) I’m pretty sure this could all be cleverly munged into one file, but I haven’t worked that out. At least I got it working so that I could make the call as a regular user, but that’s not hard. All you need to do is set pppd suid root. Unfortunately, to make this all automatic for a regular user, I would still need to put the PAP password into the script somewhere, but I don’t know how to do that, and it looks like it will soon be pointless to try to figure it out.