WvDial 1.56 review

WvDial is an easier way to connect to the internet

License: LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) File size: 93K Developer: Dave Coombs and Avery Pennarun

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WvDial is an easier way to connect to the internet. It completely avoids the need for chat scripts, edits pap-secrets and chap-secrets for you, detects your modem automatically, and chooses a valid init string.

It can even read and respond to command prompts at almost any ISP.

Requirements:
WvStreams

What's New in This Release:
Synchronize with libwvstreams v3.69
WvDialConf actually works with this release
Applied some patches from Andrew W. Nosenko that fix a couple of typos, and which makes sure that the wvdialconf man page gets installed.
Applied some patches from RedHat to make sure that WvDial and WvStreams compile clean on 64 bit architectures. Also did some cleanup to make sure that the goofy GCC that RedHat ships doesn't complain on some bits of WvDial.
Applied patches from SuSE to ensure that WvDial compiles cleanly using GCC 3.1, as well, adapt a patch to make sure that wvdialconf creates the wvdial.conf file mode 660. Also applied their multi-phone number patch (so it will dial several phone numbers in order if you ask it nicely), as well as their check to make sure inherited sections actually exist.
Applied a mega patch from SuSE that added better ISDN support, added USB modem support, added a "--no-syslog" option, inactivity timeouts, interactive passwords (WvDial will now prompt you for passwords if you ask it to), Connection checking once you're online (which can probably be adapted to run your copy of retchmail (or if you are still using fetchmail.. I guess you could run that as well) once you are online. It also reputedly works better with DialD.
Applied patch from Dushyanth Harinath to implement the "Dial Attempts" option, which will now cause WvDial to stop trying to dial after the number in this option is exceeded.
It should be mentioned somewhere that all of these nifty new features are pretty much completely untested. So please bang at them, look at them, and please send the bug reports to wvdial-list@lists.nit.ca. That's where all of the cool wvdial hackers hang out.