[ale] PPP autodial in Fedora

[Joe Knapka]

Hi everyone,

I've installed a Fedora Core 1 system for a friend of mine.  He's not
very computer-savvy, but he's been dealing with Windows crap for quite
a while, and seems genuinely interested in switching to Linux,
provided he can get his work done.

One of the main things he needed was for his network connection to
autodial whenever he needed Internet access. I thought that would be
trivial to arrange, but it wasn't. I could configure the PPP
connection to autodial, but nonetheless, when I tried to open Mozilla
or ping anything, I'd get "no such host". However, when I tried
to ping a host by IP address, the connection came up.

Of course, the problem was that it didn't know what nameserver to use,
because /etc/resolv.conf didn't get populated until the connection
came up. The solution I hit upon was to manually add a "nameserver "
line to /etc/resolv.conf (which of course gets overwritten by pppd's
resolv.conf when the connection comes up). However, this seems like an
obvious issue with a machine whose only network connection is an
autodial PPP link, so I expect there's some configuration option in
the GUI network config tool that addresses this. But I haven't been
able to find it. Does anyone know what it is?

Thanks,

-- Joe Knapka