BeOS Journal #2:
Networking the BeBox
Scot Hacker, ZDNet
12/20/96
I have a bad habit of making things more difficult than necessary, which is
probably why I spent too much time trying to get my BeBox wired when it should
have been a three-minute operation. Of course, the BeBox documentation is in as
much a preliminary state as the rest of the operating system right now, which
doesn't help. In fact, I think my experience here brought out a critical
omission in the BeBox manual.
First I tried dialing into my ISP from home with a standard external Hayes
14.4-kbps modem. I opened up the Network preferences and entered the
appropriate IP and DNS information. Then I switched to the Connect applet and
typed in a phone number, username, and password. My ISP answered, prompted me
for username and password again, and then promptly spat out a string of ASCII
garbage. I toggled some settings in the Network preferences and had a look at
the dial-o-rama script the Connect app was invoking. No success, and things got
worse. Hung serial port, debug windows . . . yick. I sent e-mails (from another
machine) to others who had already gotten BeBoxen wired. Different
modem-initialization strings were suggested. PAP versus CHAP authentication
schemes were brought up. UNIX-style chat scripts were suggested. I edited
dial-o-rama until I was blue in the face. Nothing worked.
I decided to give up on dialing in for a while, took the box to work, and
jacked it into an Ethernet cable. Before I did, I carefully copied down all the
IP, router, and DNS information from my Win 95 box. Then I used the Network
preferences to add an Ethernet connection and copied in all the information
very carefully. But Be's built-in browser, NetPositive, reported simply, "Can't
make connection." I fiddled with the Network settings some more. No luck.
Interestingly, I found that I could FTP out of the box as long as I used a real
IP address for a remote site. I could ping sites. I could even FTP into the
BeBox itself. But no DNS meant no Web browsing, no e-mail, no nothing.
Triple-checked those DNS settings, restarted Networking a million times. No
luck. Then I had an idea and checked all these settings against the TCP/IP
dialog box on my Mac. Mmmm--the gateway address was different by one digit on
that machine. Even though the cable I was attached to had worked perfectly with
the current settings on my 95 box, I swapped in the gateway from the Mac box
anyway and restarted Networking, and--bingo--NetPositive started humming away,
and I was connected. NetPositive is a pretty primitive browser, but at least I
was on. I can't wait to see the port of Netscape for BeOS.
At that point, I fired up the built-in Poor Man Web server, let it create a
default Web page, walked across the office to another machine, and entered my
IP address into Netscape. Just like that, I'm serving Web pages off the BeBox!
I haven't got a clue why the first gateway address didn't work in BeOS when it
works perfectly under 95, and I'd love to hear your theories. But who cares? I
spent the rest of the night downloading and installing Be shareware.
Speaking of which, I'd like to share a little nugget that may not be
immediately apparent to Windows and Mac users coming to the BeOS: Instead of
PKZip and StuffIt, Be developers typically utilize UNIX-style compression
techniques, which work in two steps. First you make an archive via tar and then
compress that with gzip. So to install Be downloads, you need to reverse both
of these steps. Without going into detail about the myriad options and flags
for these command-line utilities, here's all you need to know: If you have a
new download called BeApp.tgz, open a terminal window and cd to the directory
you downloaded into. Then type
gunzip BeApp.tgz
This will decompress the file and leave you with BeApp.tar. Then type
tar xvf BeApp.tar
and the archive will be expanded, usually into a new folder. At that point, you
can enter the folder and run or install the executable. In the future, this
will probably get a lot easier, but if you're jumping in now, get friendly with
some basic UNIX commands. You'll need them. Anyway, I was now more determined
than ever to get the modem working--I wasn't about to cart the box back and
forth from work to home all the time just to get on the Net every night. But
nothing I learned in my Ethernet episode helped. Again I returned to Be's PPP
page and found nothing of use. But I did notice that there was an e-mail link
to the Be employee who was maintaining that page, so I decided to write him a
detailed e-mail explaining the problem. Amazingly, he responded less than five
minutes later, suggesting that I turn off UNIX-style log-ins and send him the
ppp-read.log and ppp-write.log. The change didn't help, and these files didn't
exist. I wrote back and included a text dump from the Connect program. Again,
he responded in less than five minutes, but this time with the information I
needed--the Connect applet has nothing to do with PPP, and I had been barking
up the wrong tree all along. It turns out that the only way to dial in via PPP
is to initiate any kind of Internet activity (such as clicking on a Web link or
opening an FTP session), which in turn invokes the settings in the Network
preferences dialog box. The Connect applet, it turns out, is only for dialing
into BBSs or other machines, not for TCP/IP connections. The simplest solution
had never occurred to me, simply because I was accustomed to using a
stand-alone Connect applet for PPP on my other machines. Thinking I must have
been crazy, I scoured the Be manual again for references to this distinction
and found nothing. Ah, the travails of early adoption.
So now I'm fully wired and can start messing with the fast-growing pile of
shareware and freeware that's already cropping up for the BeOS. I'm able to
browse, grab files, update my Web site, and even read Usenet posts with Maarten
Hekkelman's very promising newsreader (can't post messages
with it yet, though). The one thing I'm still having trouble with is, believe
it or not, e-mail. It comes in just fine and I can respond just fine, but when
I choose Send Now from BeMail, the message just gets deposited as a record in
the Database, status=pending. Seeing a similar plight posted on comp.sys.be, I grabbed an update of
the mail daemon from Be's FTP site, but no luck. Same problem. If you've
resolved the same difficulty, please drop me a line.