Stupid bear...

[mdlbear]

So it seems that, while I wasn't paying attention after my dial-out server croaked several months ago, my ISP's static IP dialup service went away (along with all the local numbers). Really, the only thing I was using it for was news and a backup for mail, but I should have checked sooner. Now I need to come up with a plan B for news. Not hard now that I know that I need to.

Of course, I found this out after about six hours worth of banging my head against Debian's weird diald and pppd configuration. (Not unusual: every distro has weird config scripts for dialup. Debian appears to have changed theirs in the last year or so.)