OSUser: BeOS Journal #2 - Networking the BeBox

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BeOS Journal #2: Networking the BeBox Scot Hacker, ZDNet 12/20/96 I have a bad habit of making things more difficult than necessary, which is probably why I spent too much time trying to get my BeBox wired when it should have been a three-minute operation. Of course, the BeBox documentation is in as much a preliminary state as the rest of the operating system right now, which doesn't help. In fact, I think my experience here brought out a critical omission in the BeBox manual. First I tried dialing into my ISP from home with a standard external Hayes 14.4-kbps modem. I opened up the Network preferences and entered the appropriate IP and DNS information. Then I switched to the Connect applet and typed in a phone number, username, and password. My ISP answered, prompted me for username and password again, and then promptly spat out a string of ASCII garbage. I toggled some settings in the Network preferences and had a look at the dial-o-rama script the Connect app was invoking. No success, and things got worse. Hung serial port, debug windows . . . yick. I sent e-mails (from another machine) to others who had already gotten BeBoxen wired. Different modem-initialization strings were suggested. PAP versus CHAP authentication schemes were brought up. UNIX-style chat scripts were suggested. I edited dial-o-rama until I was blue in the face. Nothing worked. I decided to give up on dialing in for a while, took the box to work, and jacked it into an Ethernet cable. Before I did, I carefully copied down all the IP, router, and DNS information from my Win 95 box. Then I used the Network preferences to add an Ethernet connection and copied in all the information very carefully. But Be's built-in browser, NetPositive, reported simply, "Can't make connection." I fiddled with the Network settings some more. No luck. Interestingly, I found that I could FTP out of the box as long as I used a real IP address for a remote site. I could ping sites. I could even FTP into the BeBox itself. But no DNS meant no Web browsing, no e-mail, no nothing. Triple-checked those DNS settings, restarted Networking a million times. No luck. Then I had an idea and checked all these settings against the TCP/IP dialog box on my Mac. Mmmm--the gateway address was different by one digit on that machine. Even though the cable I was attached to had worked perfectly with the current settings on my 95 box, I swapped in the gateway from the Mac box anyway and restarted Networking, and--bingo--NetPositive started humming away, and I was connected. NetPositive is a pretty primitive browser, but at least I was on. I can't wait to see the port of Netscape for BeOS. At that point, I fired up the built-in Poor Man Web server, let it create a default Web page, walked across the office to another machine, and entered my IP address into Netscape. Just like that, I'm serving Web pages off the BeBox! I haven't got a clue why the first gateway address didn't work in BeOS when it works perfectly under 95, and I'd love to hear your theories. But who cares? I spent the rest of the night downloading and installing Be shareware. Speaking of which, I'd like to share a little nugget that may not be immediately apparent to Windows and Mac users coming to the BeOS: Instead of PKZip and StuffIt, Be developers typically utilize UNIX-style compression techniques, which work in two steps. First you make an archive via tar and then compress that with gzip. So to install Be downloads, you need to reverse both of these steps. Without going into detail about the myriad options and flags for these command-line utilities, here's all you need to know: If you have a new download called BeApp.tgz, open a terminal window and cd to the directory you downloaded into. Then type `gunzip BeApp.tgz` This will decompress the file and leave you with BeApp.tar. Then type `tar xvf BeApp.tar` and the archive will be expanded, usually into a new folder. At that point, you can enter the folder and run or install the executable. In the future, this will probably get a lot easier, but if you're jumping in now, get friendly with some basic UNIX commands. You'll need them. Anyway, I was now more determined than ever to get the modem working--I wasn't about to cart the box back and forth from work to home all the time just to get on the Net every night. But nothing I learned in my Ethernet episode helped. Again I returned to Be's PPP page and found nothing of use. But I did notice that there was an e-mail link to the Be employee who was maintaining that page, so I decided to write him a detailed e-mail explaining the problem. Amazingly, he responded less than five minutes later, suggesting that I turn off UNIX-style log-ins and send him the ppp-read.log and ppp-write.log. The change didn't help, and these files didn't exist. I wrote back and included a text dump from the Connect program. Again, he responded in less than five minutes, but this time with the information I needed--the Connect applet has nothing to do with PPP, and I had been barking up the wrong tree all along. It turns out that the only way to dial in via PPP is to initiate any kind of Internet activity (such as clicking on a Web link or opening an FTP session), which in turn invokes the settings in the Network preferences dialog box. The Connect applet, it turns out, is only for dialing into BBSs or other machines, not for TCP/IP connections. The simplest solution had never occurred to me, simply because I was accustomed to using a stand-alone Connect applet for PPP on my other machines. Thinking I must have been crazy, I scoured the Be manual again for references to this distinction and found nothing. Ah, the travails of early adoption. So now I'm fully wired and can start messing with the fast-growing pile of shareware and freeware that's already cropping up for the BeOS. I'm able to browse, grab files, update my Web site, and even read Usenet posts with Maarten Hekkelman's very promising newsreader (can't post messages with it yet, though). The one thing I'm still having trouble with is, believe it or not, e-mail. It comes in just fine and I can respond just fine, but when I choose Send Now from BeMail, the message just gets deposited as a record in the Database, status=pending. Seeing a similar plight posted on `comp.sys.be`, I grabbed an update of the mail daemon from Be's FTP site, but no luck. Same problem. If you've resolved the same difficulty, please drop me a line. |
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