Frequently Asked Questions for Babylon 1.4 ========================================== Q. How can a permanent connection be made at boot time? The bdial command must be reissued until the connection is successfully made at which time babylond can take over responsibility for initiating redials (see the links field in babylon.conf). Put a line like: ( while ! bdial site ; do sleep 5 ; done ) & in your rc.local, which just executes bdial repeatly with a five second pause between failed dials. Q. What does cause code X mean? Babylon normally reports the cause codes in hexadecimal, in which case you can look at the table below (only the last two digits are significant). For the few places where it is reported in decimal, convert to hex first. Cause Code Meaning ------------------------- 01 Unassigned number 02 No route to specified transit network 03 No route to destination 06 Channel unacceptable 10 Normal clearing 11 User busy 12 No user responding 13 User alerting, no answer 15 Call rejected 16 Number changed 1a Non-selected user clearing 1b Destination out of order 1c Invalid number format 1d Facility rejected 1e Respond to status enquiry 1f Normal, unspecified cause 22 No circuit available 26 Network out of order 29 Temporary failure 2a Network congestion 2b Access info discarded 2c Requested channel not available 2d Pre-empted 2f Resource unavailable, unspecified 32 Requested facility not subscribed 34 Outgoing call barred 36 Incoming call barred 39 Bearer capability not authorized 3a Bearer capability not available 3f Service not available 41 Capability not implemented 42 Channel not implemented 45 Facility not implemented 46 Only restricted digital information bearer capability is available 4f Service or option not implemented, unspecified 51 Invalid call reference 52 Channel does not exist 53 Suspended call exists, but this call identity does not 54 Call identity in use 55 No call suspended 56 Call having the requested identity has been cleared 58 Incompatible destination 5b Invalid transit network selection 5f Invalid message unspecified 60 Mandatory information element missing 61 Message type non-existant or not implemented 62 Wrong message 63 Bad information element 64 Invalid element contents 65 Wrong message for state 66 Timer expired 67 Mandatory information element length error 6f Protocol error 7f Interworking unspecified Q. bdial reports a cause with 00 at the end which isn't listed in the table above. What does this mean? The local system is the source of the hangup. This should be acommpanied by another message indicating the real source of the problem. Q. My DataCommute/Plus card is failing with a cause code of ff -- help! That is the driver's way of reporting that it doesn't know what the cause code it should be reporting is. The dcplus driver will log any further indication of status it receives from the card with a message that begins with cause_ind. Q. Why does bdial fail with the message 'Failed: IPCP: Peer did not provide an IP address'? This can happen if neither end of connection is configured to give the other an IP address. Look into setting the local/remote ip fields in your babylon.conf with the addresses given to you by your provider. Q. Why does dialing fail with 'Failed: LCP: timed out -- no packets received'? One possible explanation for this is that the site you're trying to dial is not using the same format for data as your system is. Frequently this is caused by dialing into a site configured to use 56Kbps when setup to use 64Kbps, or vice versa. The same thing can happen when trying to use HDLC framing to connect with a modem. Q. We are dialing into an Ascend P50/P75 router and the connection will not do MPP (more than one link). A. Check the revision of the Ascend firmware. We have discovered that Ascend has solved a variety of issues with MPP in their current revisions. While older routers will do MPP with the 1.2 Babylon series, they will not with the 1.3 series. The reason is we are fully compliant with the MPP spec ratified this year by the IETF. Older version of Babylon were not compliant to this spec and we assume the older Ascend firmware was not either. Ascend newer versions work correctly in our testing. We used Ascend 7.3.1 firmware with babylon 1.3.13-12 with great success. Q. We are dialing into our ISP and the connection never completes. Bdial always responds with "Failed: Timeout." A. What happens usually is the negiation between Babylon and the remote router appears to be working, however, the IP numbers are never returned. Eventually, the connection aborts. bdial will report the connection timed out. During our investigation of this situation we discovered the problem was the remote router not following the PPP spec. If the remote router is under your control, we strongly recommend upgrading the firmware. The above FAQ question is example of how this can help. However, if you are calling into a large ISP, this may not be possible. In order to break babylon to work with these broken routers, we've added a command line switch (--broken-acfc) to work around the problem. In most cases, this allows the connection to be established.