[techtalk] internet

[Helena Verrill]

I'm glad 'kppp' has come up, since I've been wanting to ask a question
about it.

> I am probably going to be quite unpopular for making this suggestion, but...
> if you are a relative newbie coming from a Windows environment, the  easiest
> way is with kppp.  It looks a whole lot like Dial-Up Networking in Windows.
> (Yeah, I know, you don't learn what's under the hood that way, but it's
> soooo *easy*.)

I think this may be my problem - since I have been using kppp I've
not really got much idea about what is going on.  (I suppose I might
count as a relative newbie coming from a unix environment - but before 
I got my own home computer, everything on unix computers at university was
set up for me by nice sys admin people, and I never had to set it up
myself before.)

I'm running KDE, and linux 5.0 (need to get round to upgrading)

My problem is that sometimes kppp instantly connects up to the internet,
no problems, but other times I have to try as many as 6 or 7 time to
get it to connect.  It keeps just hanging up, and gives me messages like
"deamon died unexpectedly", or "time out while waiting for ppp interface
to come up".  And when I click on "details" it gives a transcript of the
call - which just ends up with "HANG UP", and in the "diagnostics" box
it just says "sorry can't help you there".  

Though I can live with this, since eventually it connects, it is a bit
annoying, and it would be nice if anyone can suggest anything.
When I connect using windows it always connects first time.

Another little thing is that kppp seems to get confused about it's pid -
very often when I log on again, a box pops up telling me that it thinks
kppp is running with a certain pid - but this is not true - why does it
make this mistake?

Thanks for reading this far!
Helena