I'm trying to set up a personal system to use kde and kppp. kppp is easily set up for root but for ordinary users? RedHat seems to have gone out of its way to make this impossible! I previously used Mandrake 6.0 and kppp was the only modem solution I could get to work reliably for me. Now I've "upgraded" back to Redhat 6.1 (I decided Mandrake was a little too unreliable) and what a mess! (Note - this is a brand new out of the box installation.) For root, typing kppp in the default setup maps to /usr/sbin/kppp and all works well. However, for non-root users, the system finds /usr/bin/kppp which is a symbolic link to something called /usr/bin/consolehelper which demands to know the root password. No thanks, I don't want to have to type in the root password just to start kppp. There is all sorts of documentation provided by the KDE folks for getting kppp to work - unfortunately, none of it applies to the configuration Redhat has provided us with. I tried all the suggestions in the KDE help. So I decided that the easiest thing to do would be to make a new /usr/bin/kppp that is a symbolic link directly to /usr/sbin/kppp. This works, sort of, but when I try to invoke it, it tells me that it can't find the interface ppp0. I'm stymied here. I have got the system set up to allow non-root users to access my ppp0 interface. And in Gnome/RP3 as a non-root user I have no trouble finding ppp0.
It's not a bug, it's a security feature. In countries where you pay for connections, you don't want non-privileged users to open connections. If you want to permit non-privileged users to connect using kppp, either make kppp setuid root, or use sudo to grant them root access to just kppp.
This answer answers nothing, unfortunately. Did you even read my report? Which "kppp" are you talking about? The one in /usr/sbin which is not on the path of non-root users, or the one is on their path, the one in /usr/bin? Was my solution of removing the symlink in /usr/bin which pointed to consolehelper and replacing it with one that pointed to /usr/sbin/kppp (which I DID setuid root) the correct one? Or is there better? And if it was correct, why am I getting all those messages about not being able to find the interface ppp0? I did set up the interface to be accessible to all users which is proven anyway by the fact that RP3 is able to find it without difficulty. My point, really, is that there were simple instructions in the kppp documentation that tell you how to set things up so that non-root users can access kppp. Since Redhat has seen fit to set things up differently than the setup envisioned by the authors of that documentation, and that documentation is no longer correct, Redhat owes its users clear replacement documentation.
Sorry, I automatically sent a standard reply after reading the first paragraph, because the security features often get reported as bugs. Yes, it was right to rm /usr/bin/kppp and ln -s /usr/sbin/kppp /usr/bin. The can't find ppp0 bug looks like a problem with pppd... Did you update the ppp package? There have been a couple of problems with the stock 6.1 one.
No,I'm using the stock ppp. I'll try that. Thanks. You might want to pass on my comments on documentation to you documentation people.
Since you didn't enter anything more, I assume updating pppd fixed this.