The

User's Manual

kcmkisdn (provider configuration)



5. Account configuration

One of the most important points for using kISDN is configuration of accounts since you can define multiple accounts at a single strike and give access permissions for single users (you can, of course, give access to more than just 1 ISP for a single user). The user may then make his choice from within the combo box in the dialup client, in this way usage of several different ISP's gets a child's play.
Let's have a look at a sample configuration now, to this purpose please open the 'Accounts' dialog. The figure below displays an already configured account, in your case the form should be empty:

Accounting dialog



Beginning with release 0.5.0 kISDN comes with a provider database, so, with a little luck, your ISP has already been registered, in which case you're almost done (you only need to enter your username and password after having chosen an appropriate ISP). To have a look at the DB just hit the 'Database' button and a window similar to the one below will open:

Provider database



The procedure is obvious, just choose your country, city and ISP (if already registered) and hit 'OK', at which point another small dialog will open and ask you for username and password:

Auth dialog

When you're ready, just hit 'OK' again and your ISP is added to your account list; all provider specific data will then be taken from the database, which means you're done with account configuration.
Attention: In any case, you have to enable this account for the users on your box (this is in most cases you) in the dialog 'Users', otherwise the dialup client kisdn will not offer it to you !
In case your provider is not registered in kISDN's database you'll have to enter ISP specific data yourself, see the following example.
To configure a new ISP, you need the following data:

We need your help to extend the ISP database, so we beg you to submit your ISP's data after having successfully configured your account. To do this, please go to http://kisdn.headlight.de/providerDB and fill in the form provided there; your ISP will then be added to the database in the next full release of kISDN.
Ok, let's have a closer look at account configuration (you can skip the following paragraphs, if you configured your ISP from the database).


5.1 Explicit ISP configuration

This type of configuration applies for ISP's not registered in the kISDN database. Clicking the 'New' button should give you the dialog displayed below:

New Account dialog

Configuration now follows a simple 'Fill-in-the-form' scheme, most of the input fields should be self-explanatory, so I will drop only a few words on single topics.
It's possible to set more than just one ISDN phone number for your ISP, so if the first of the numbers appearing in 'Phone List' is busy (or even worse, down), I4L will try the next one and so on. You can add those phone numbers by simply filling in the field 'Remote Phone' and then press 'Add'; if you mistyped any of the phone numbers, click on the misspelled phone number and press 'Delete' (in that case you'll have to retype and add that number, of course).
The following 3 fields define the protocols used by your ISP. If unsure, please don't change anything: The default set of protocols (syncPPP/HDLC/Transparent) applies to approximately 95% of all ISDN internet accounts, so chances are very good keeping those settings. You don't remember giving those pieces of information to Windows ? Well, in most cases ISP's provide so-called access software for Windows so you don't have to bother with those settings. kISDN, however, does not know about your provider a priori, so you'll have to do it yourself (situation improves since more and more provider information is submitted and added to kISDN's provider database).
I4L suppports the following encapsulation protocols:

We know from the submission of ISP data that syncPPP is the most often used encapsulation, but all other encapsulations should work as well with kISDN (we just don't have any feedback on this issue - maybe you will change this). The same applies for layer 2 protocols (most often HDLC is used) and due to I4L the layer 3 protocol is fixed to 'Trans' (transparent).
You may choose a different value for the number of 'Dial attempts' (10 proved to be quite good), but this, of course, depends on your specific ISP. Also, the 'Timeout' value should be thought about carefully. In Germany, for example, most surfing is done in the night hours and one phone unit is, in best case, 4 minutes, so 235 seconds (=3 mins, 55 secs) may proove to be quite good.
The channel bundling option ('Bundle Channels', Professional Edition only) may be used when data should be transmitted with double speed (i.e. 128 kBit/s), 2 points on this: Since kISDN 0.6.0 channel bundling is actually working (we made some expensive tests to be sure of this), but due to some lack of feature in I4L using syncPPP you'll have to add the second channel manually (see Chapter Channel Bundling for a more detailed description).


5.2 IP asignment

Now let's have a look at the 'IP' dialog:

IP dialog

To have access to the internet, you must be assigned an IP address (you're becoming part of a network and every host must have a unique name) and you need the IP address of the remote host to be connected at all (data from and to the internet is routed by the remote machine). There are 2 ways to accomplish this:

In most cases you are assigned local and remote IP's dynamically (which is the default setting in the 'IP' dialog), so most probably you can skip the 'IP' dialog and go over to DNS configuration.
In the more unlikely case of a static IP assignment your ISP should have given you

If you don't have them, it is very likely that you are assigned IP's dynamically, in the other case, please click on 'Static IP Address' and the IP input fields will be enabled; then enter your IP's in the so-called Quad Dotted Notation, i.e. 4 numbers in the range of 0 to 255 separated by dots.


5.3 Nameserver Settings (DNS)

Now let's switch over to DNS (Domain Name Service) configuration, please click on the 'DNS' tab:

DNS dialog

The first field in this dialog is titled 'Domain', what the heck is that ? The domain name is - as the name implies - the name of the network domain your machine is in. Some people set this to 'home.org' or something similar, but although it does no harm, it does make no sense either. In fact, it's more clever to set it to the domain you're most often working in, an example: User johndoe has an account at the University of NoWhere in NoWhereLand and is member of the Faculty of Physics. Very often he's starting remote shells on some machines at the Faculty of Physics to do some numeric simulations and to have a look at the results. All of the machines of that faculty belong to the domain physics.uni-nowhere.nwl (which should remind you of a shortcut of 'Faculty of Physics at NoWhere University, NoWhereLand'). So, most often, johndoe has to issue a

telnet machinex.physics.uni-nowhere.nwl


Very soon johndoe recognizes, that all this typing is rather nasty, but what could he do ? The answer is - simple, johndoe has to set his domain to

physics.uni-nowhere.nwl


and next time he's connected, a

telnet machinex


will suffice, the network code will extend telnet machinex to machinex.physics.uni-nowhere.nwl on it's own, so johndoe won't have to bother anymore.

But for now, we still seem to have a problem since machinex.physics.uni-nowhere.nwl is still no valid IP address, and so, as we know from above, we still don't have access to that machine via internet. Of course, we could just telnet to the specific IP of machinex.physics.uni-nowhere.nwl and be happy, but in fact we're not happy at all with this situation. We obviously need some means to resolve host names (such as machinex.physics.uni-nowhere.nwl) into IP addresses, this means is called DNS (Domain Name Service, the name should be self-explanatory by now). How does it work ? Well, in principle, there are some machines in the web (the so-called DNS servers) that are given a hostname and will return the corresponding IP address (if any; it also works the other way round, i.e. you may get the hostname of a machine you only have the IP address of). But since these machines are part of the web, they must have an IP address themselves ! For obvious reasons it doesn't make any sense to use hostnames for these machines, so you have to fill in at least one IP of a DNS server explicitly here. As you remember from the 'IP' dialog, this is done using the 'Quad Dotted Notation', i.e. 4 numbers in the range of 0 to 255 separated by dots. You have to enter this IP in the field titled 'IP Address' and to press 'Add' (the IP will then move to the 'Address List' below). If you mistyped anything after having pressed 'Add' - don't worry: Click on the misspelled IP and press 'Remove', the IP address will vanish and you'll have to retype and add it again.


5.4 Authentication

We're almost done with account configuration, so let's turn to authentication, finally:

Authentication dialog

Please choose the type of authentication protocol your ISP's using (it is most likely PAP, and therefore it's the default setting); the authentication protocol is used by your ISP to check your account permission.
If you don't need authentication, you might choose 'None' and, in consequence, the 'Username' and 'Password' fields will stay disabled. Otherwise you'll have to fill in these fields; when entering the password, the keyboard will only echo '*' for every single letter, so it's not possible for another person (who may be dropping in incidentally) to read your password from the screen while you're still typing in. kcmkisdn will store your password(s) into a file that is only readable by root, so nobody else has access to it.


5.5 Granting Permissions

This dialog enables root to grant access permissions to different users for the configured account.

User permissions dialog

This dialog works much the same as the dialogs for ISDN phone numbers and DNS servers, i.e. enter a home directory path in the field titled 'User's Homedirectory' and press 'Add', mistyped path names may be removed using the 'Remove' button. Instead of typing in home directories, you might consider open a filemanager window, climbing down to the root directory ('/'), dragging the home directory of the user from the HTML view and dropping it on this dialog - it should appear in the 'Users list' then. At some point in the future you might want to remove access permissions to this account, to accomplish this, simply change the tick mark 'Enable Account' and none of the users below will be able to access that account any longer (we recommend a check of kISDN correct behavior, though).


5.6 Callback

Within this dialog you can apply the settings for a callback account (lucky you ;-) and configuration of a callback server should be possible, too.

Callback dialog

Unfortunately, we actually don't have access to a callback server and making callback configuration GUI aware is some kind of puzzle for us. Thus, if callback is not properly setup this is due to lack of information and we'd be happy to receive further suggestions on this matter.

Well, how is it supposed to work in kISDN ? First of all, you habe to 'Enable Callback', of course; in this way the callback configuration fields will become available.
Next, you can specify ingoing numbers (i.e. the numbers of your callback server); since you already have supplied them in the 'Phone List' of the 'Remote' dialog, you may now choose 'Strip leading 0's from outgoing numbers', why that ? Any incoming call comes with a prefix (at least in Germany) and a prefix always starts with a '0'. If you have, for example, specified '012345678' as outgoing number (01234 being the prefix) your server will call back and supply the caller ID '12345678', which, in turn, is the outgoing number except for a leading '0'. If you expect something different than this number, you may choose 'Other' and enter a single caller ID for incoming callbacks.

Now you have to specify, if the local machine will initiate (thus being the client) or answer a callback (server side). In most cases you are the client, so 'Local machine initiates callback' should be OK, and you only have to enter the amount of time, after which you (the caller) will hangup the line (the server will not be able to call back as long as you still hold the connection).
If, on the other hand, your machine is the callback server (I'd like to see your phone bill ;-), you have to choose 'Local machine answers callback'. The fields that become available now, are almost self-explanatory as you have to specify, whether your machine should hangup the line before calling back or not, and after what amount of time the callback is triggered (if this is done too soon, the line will - in the worst case - still be busy).


5.7 Additional Settings

This dialog features some settings concerning incoming calls as well as ipppd options for compression and IP negotiation.

More dialog

The first checkbox, namely 'Secure mode for incoming calls' deals with data connections. A caller not specified on your ingoing phone number list (only available with callback) won't get access to your machine at all and thus will not be able to use the callback service provided by the local machine.
The second checkbox, if enabled, allows signalization of incoming voice calls to users that have access to this account. Note, that this is a global option; if you disable this option, it doesn't matter if a user has enabled call signalization in his/her custimization dialog at all !
The following group of checkboxes, 'ipppd', supplies some options for the ISDN Point-To- Point-Daemon ipppd. In most cases it is safe to leave these untouched (i.e. unchecked), you should really know, what you're doing before checking one of these boxes, so I renounce any explanation of them.

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T. Westheider / October 16th 1998 - kISDN Release 0.7.0