HOWTO use Road Runner Dial Access with a Linux (or other Unix) System

Dial access needs to be enabled for your RR master account. This can be done on http://dialaccess.rr.com/ (click on "Register").

Pick a dial-in number from the list at http://dialaccess.rr.com/ (click on "Search Phone Numbers"; you'll also have the option to download the whole list).

Logging in is hard to do without the Road Runner dial client, because it takes place in two phases that have different username and password requirements. These phases are:

1) logging in to the modem server
2) PPP CHAP authentication

For phase 1, any username that starts with "aolnet/ent." seems to work. Assuming that your Road Runner master account is master@rr.com, the recommended username to use here is "aolnet/ent.master@rr.com", since that's what the Windows login script here appears to use.

The phase 1 password can be any non-empty string, it does not have to match your Road Runner account password.

[Note: The Windows login script behaves a bit differently based on how it identifies the type of login server it is connected to. Some servers prompt with "Username" and others with "Login". Also, for some servers the script sends a "ppp" command between phases 1 & 2. I haven't found this to be necessary on the login servers I've used.]

Phase 2 is where the Road Runner username and password are validated. What seems to happen is that the login server sends a CHAP challenge using the master account password as the encrypted secret. The dial-in host needs to respond to this challenge, identifying itself with the master account username, e.g. "master@rr.com". Using pppd, this can done by configuring the "chap-secrets" file (potentially in the /etc/ppp directory) like this:

# Secrets for authentication using CHAP
# client        server           secret         IP addresses
# ----------------------------------------------------------
  *             road-runner      my-password    *

and invoking "pppd" with these arguments:

    pppd ... name master@rr.com remotename road-runner ...

The process of dialing the phone number and starting pppd can be done many ways. I do it with pppd and chat, like this:

pppd /dev/modem 115200 crtscts defaultroute usepeerdns debug nodetach \
	name master@rr.com remotename road-runner \
	connect './chat.sh 261-9332'

with the following "chat.sh" script:

#!/bin/sh

# usage: $0 <phone number>

chat -T "$1" -t 120 -V -S -f chatrc

where "chatrc" contains:

ABORT BUSY
ABORT 'NO CARRIER'
'' ATZ
OK ATDT\T
CONNECT ''
TIMEOUT 10
Login:--Username: aolnet/ent.master@rr.com
Password: anything

[Using TIMEOUT and Login:--Username: like this is a hack. If anyone writes an expect script to do it better, please send me a copy.]

After pppd is up, the final manual step is to copy /etc/ppp/resolv.conf to /etc/resolv.conf. The connection is brought down by killing pppd with a ^C.

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