Topic: Suffering a bad BPAlogin experience?

[Luke Drumm]

Hi,

Are you a Telstra user suffering from a string of weird syslog messages and odd connection losses all due to BPAlogin?

Try these handy steps:

(They assume you've already installed both the BPAlogin and e-smith-BPAlogin packages. If you haven't then read the notes at the end before you do so)

Step 1. Create the directory:

Type the following:
  cd /etc/e-smith/templates-custom
  mkdir /etc
  cd etc
  mkdir bpalogin.conf
  cd bpalogin.conf

Step 2. The templates.

Using you favorite text editor...

  Create the file '40authserver' with the contents of:
    authserver dce-server


  Create the file '50minheartbeat' with the contents of:
    minhearbeatinterval 1


  Create the file '60localport' with the contents of:
    localport 5051

  Create the file '70authdomain' with the contents of:
    authdomain nsw.bigpond.net.au


Step 3. Rebuild and Restart  Type the following:
    /sbin/e-smith/expand-template /etc/bpalogin.conf
    service bpalogin restart


Things to note:
  - The authdomain should be changed to your particular state.
  - The BPAlogin 2.01 available from the e-smith contrib area doesn't seem to be the same file size nor as stable. I would suggest downloading and installing the 'original' from:
    http://www.trontech.net/bpalogin/download.php3
    (Its a pretty cool web site as well)
  - These changes mean you no longer need to add the BPAauthserver line to your config file.
  - Luke Drumm takes no responsibility for your complete system destruction... but that shouldn't be to hard to avoid. If you get too lost just remove the files you've created in the custom-templates directory and rebuild/restart the service.

Regards,
Luke Drumm

[Luke Drumm]

A few things I forgot to mention...

 - I suspect the localport used by each state. eg. 5050 for Vic. 5051 for NSW etc. If you're receiving messages in your syslog about unexpected messages try changing the localport setting to match.

 - If somebody wants to bundle this up into a new RPM or adjust Charlies existing RPM I'm sure it'll gain the appreciation of quite a few users.

Regards,
Luke Drumm

[Charlie Brady]

Luke Drumm wrote:

> A few things I forgot to mention...
>
> - I suspect the localport used by each state. eg. 5050 for Vic.
> 5051 for NSW etc. If you're receiving messages in your syslog
> about unexpected messages try changing the localport setting to
> match.

Do you know any other way of finding that out? If there's no systematic way, it'll have to be set via  a configuration variable.

> - If somebody wants to bundle this up into a new RPM or adjust
> Charlies existing RPM I'm sure it'll gain the appreciation of
> quite a few users.

Luke, why don't you take it on? You have all the tools you need (you can maintain RPMs on an e-smith server, as long as they only need perl and RPM, which is true of all the e-smith-* RPMs. People, including myself, can help you out on the devinfo mailing list if you have any trouble. And e-smith will give you ftp space to store your contributions.

Regards

Charlie

[Charlie Brady]

Luke Drumm wrote:

> Try these handy steps:

How about we turn these into a new version of the e-smith-bpalogin RPM?

> Create the file '60localport' with the contents of:
> localport 5051

As I asked in the other post, is there any systematic way of finding out this number?

> Create the file '70authdomain' with the contents of:
> authdomain nsw.bigpond.net.au

Does this string appear anywhere in the /etc/dhcpc/eth1.info file? If so, we can automate the setting of this value.

BTW, I didn't mention in the other post, but there is documentation on the e-smith.org site on making modifications to an e-smith-* rpm file. You shouldn't have any trouble building a new version, and people will thank you for doing it!

Regards

Charlie