I' m about to get an Alcatel ADSL modem in two weeks; the connection is PPPoA going through the USB modem. As far as I can find there are no drivers yet for this (a link here which is a BT unoffical FAQ.) So has anyone got a USB ADSL Modem working (PPPoE seems to be built into OSX already?, but of course BT requires me to use PPPoA via USB)

On the alcatel website there are drivers for Win32 Mac (Classic) and Linux. Any idea if the Linux can be compiled or another workaround?

Tcpdump is great and I was looking ahead using it. The bigger was my surprise when I could not, because tcpdump does not recognize my PPP internet connection (or better the ppp0 device) as being configured. Apple's Network Utility has the same sort of problem (it shows only en0, even while being on-line via PPP). Here's an example:

root# ifconfig ppp0


ppp0: flags=8055 mtu 1500
        inet 62.84.136.53 --> 62.84.128.250 netmask 0xff000000


root# tcpdump -i ppp0
tcpdump: ppp0: Device not configured


root#

Please help - how can I get packet monitoring on PPP working??

From http://www.nocrew.org/software/httptunnel.html:

"httptunnel creates a bidirectional virtual data connection tunnelled in HTTP requests. The HTTP requests can be sent via an HTTP proxy if so desired. This can be useful for users behind restrictive firewalls. If WWW access is allowed through a HTTP proxy, it's possible to use httptunnel and, say, telnet or PPP to connect to a computer outside the firewall."

Translation: As long as your proxy allows access to web pages, and you have access to both a machine inside the firewall as well as a machine outside the firewall capable of running httptunnel, you can run any one TCP/IP service through the firewall -- such as Apple Filing Protocol (iDisk, iTools, AppleTalk/AppleShare via TCP/IP), gnutella, Unreal Tournement server, etc. -- between the two machines.

Read the rest of this article if you'd like a step-by-step how-to on getting httptunnel working on OS X...

Skinlayers

I have two Macintosh computers at home and I have them interconnected with each other using a router, (Netgear RT 314), my problem is that my newest Mac is a G4 Cube with auto negotiation on the ethernet port. The router also uses auto negotiation and neither computer nor router will talk to each other. This problem was solved using a utility called "Duplexer Tool" which works fine in OS 9.1, and that solved my ethernet problem by setting my G4 cube to 10 Mb/s, and letting the router set itself to the same speed.

I cannot do this in OS X as the Duplexer tool only works in OS 9.1, now in OS X there is a command "ifconfig" which seems to address this problem, but I do not know how to configure this to set my Ethernet port to 10 Mb/s. Can anyone help me, and is this a fairly common problem?

Thank you.
Paul Cooper

[Editor's note: About the only value I can add here is that there's a file called "iftab" in /etc that needs to be edited. It contains this line:

en0     inet    -AUTOMATIC-

which needs to be changed to specify the connect rate, I would imagine. Anyone have any info to help configure an Ethernet card manually?]

A reader is looking for information on some advanced FTP server options in OS X. He's tried the various boards and had no luck, so I'm posting here in case there are any answers out there. He writes:

I've looked near and far and have heard from many other people the same problem. Finding a concise document to set up a FTP server on OS X is hard to find. Basically I am looking for some tips on these few tasks which I can not figure out and I believe would help many other OS X newbies:

1. I have set up a ftpchroot file to resrict users to their home directories, but how do I provide them a link in their home directory to a community folder for all of them to upload and download from?
   
2. How do I limit access to say two logins per user, and limit their bandwidth?
   
3. How do I go about setting up groups in user administration say so that all FTP users would be in thier own user group of FTP?

If anyone could shed some light on these relatively simple tasks which are complicated to us newbies please please feel free to provide some answers. Thank you.

Ethereal is a NetXray-like tool that runs in an X-Window environment. I was most pleased to discover that it has already been successfully ported to OSX!

See http://www.ethereal.com (look under downloads - binary packages)

This was really good work by Peter F. Handel. If you have X-Widows running on OSX (you can do this with either the free XFree86 or Tenon's commercial XTools), this application is worth a look.

The incomparable Brad Suinn from Apple has been kind enough to release juicy tidbits about the AppleShare X Client in a unauthorized readme. Amongst other things the end of the file shows how to do an AFP/IP connection using SSH so everything is nice and secure and encrypted. Check out:

http://homepage.mac.com/suinn/AShareXDevNotes.html (search on "SSH" to find the relevant section)

[Editor's note: You may also want to check out Brad's home page for some other interesting items]

The network preferences file is used to store all the user entered information about your TCP-IP/PPPoE/PPP settings. If you are looking to automatically setup these settings for use in an "easy installer", the preferences file can be found at this location:

/var/db/SystemConfiguration/preferences.xml

This file is usually owned by root, in group wheel.

Anyone know how to change the MAC Address on the ethernet card?
I've been trying ifconfig but I can't seem to get it to work.

My cable provider registers MAC address and I switch back and forth between two machines. I don't want to use a router. Any help would be appreciated.

The /etc/hosts file by default is ignored by OS X. Though it is possible to import hosts into the "machines" directory (see tips here on macosxhints), there is also a way to configure lookupd so it consults /etc/hosts directly.

lookupd can use different agents to lookup hosts: e.g. DNSAgent which consults DNS, FFAgent which consults local files like /etc/hosts, and CacheAgent which will keep a local cache. The trick is to tell lookupd which agents to use in which order.

Read the rest of this article if you'd like the details on making OS X use your local hosts file before it uses the DNS servers.