‘Tis the only comfort of the miserable to have partners in their woes. — Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

When last we left our intrepid Linux explorer, he had just tamed the Beast with the Blue Tooth to win through, at long last, the dread Jungle of Double Vision. Tired but satisfied, basking in the twitters of the modem-birds above, he made his way to the shores of the fabled Lake of Communications. In the center, his long-sought goal was clearly visible. But little did he know that the twin Serpents of Communications Silence lurked ‘neath the calm surface before him…

I had mentioned earlier that the postcard spam was almost good enough to fool even me. Well, it did manage to fool someone of my acquaintance, and when she told me about it a few days later, I knew that I would have to clean up the mess.

While I scanned her system to see if she’d been infected (the jury is still out on that), she was going to use my laptop to log onto her banking site and change her passwords. She doesn’t have high-speed Internet, only dial-up, so I had to get my laptop’s modem working.

Playing around with the networking stuff had shown me that there was a modem setup already available. Great, thought I, Ubuntu detected my modem and has it all ready to work. All I need to do is plug in the phone number and login data and I should be fine. But Mama Geek didn’t raise no dummy — I knew I needed to make sure it worked before I left my known good Internet connection behind.

Just as well that I did, because — surprise, surprise! — it didn’t work.

This page showed me several ways to configure the various connections. I confidently set it up, plugged a phone line into my rarely-used modem, and told it to dial… only to be told that /dev/modem didn’t exist. Hm.

A link on the same page led me here. I confidently downloaded the scanModem tool, set it up, and ran it… only to find that it’s output was just short of gibberish, even to me. It seemed to be saying that I had two things that could be modems, and after careful examination of all of the output files, it looked like only one of them actually was: a Conexant modem. It sent me to this page, where it said I could get drivers for it. Maybe so, but I found that site almost as confusing as scanModem’s output, due to the number of different chipsets that they support and the confusion over what my modem actually was, an HCF or an HSF model. The numbers that scanModem had provided didn’t match anything in either list.

After trying to puzzle it out for a little while, I decided to try the HSF drivers. According to the scanModem output, the HSF ones lacked the digital signal processor of the HCF models, so operating under the assumption that Dell went with the cheapest option they could find (i.e. the one that requires the least amount of hardware), I tried it. It worked. It’s nice to know that we can rely on companies like Dell to be predictable, at least.

After a reboot (evidently required), further tests shows that I could connect to the Internet through the modem now — it was only 14.4Kbps, but that was sufficient for my purposes. Hurray! I headed out to clean up the possible Trojan/spyware mess at my acquaintance’s house. (I haven’t been able to confirm that she even has one yet, thanks primarily to the really slow Internet connection on her computer, but that’s a story for another day.)

When I returned home, I decided that I didn’t want to go up to the office and connect my laptop to the wired network. I had a wireless network that I rarely had a chance to use; why not just connect to it and do my work in a cooler part of the house? I knew that I had the driver for my laptop’s wireless network card already installed, because Ubuntu had given me dire warnings about it being closed-source, so I flipped the kill-switch off and gave it a shot.

The WiFi light wouldn’t come on until I’d rebooted, but once it did, it was easy enough. A left-click on the network icon gave me a menu of networks discovered, including the “Connect to Other Wireless Network” option — I needed that because I have my network set up not to broadcast it’s ID. Entering the information went smoothly, and though it took a long time to connect, it finally did. That’s when things got interesting, in the form of a dialog that popped up: “Enter password for default keyring to unlock”. Nothing like a bit of broken English to start your day out right.

None of my passwords would work in that dialog. I’m not sure what password it was looking for; I suspect it’s something that I’d entered a long time ago while trying to set up one of the backup packages I was evaluating, and not knowing any better, that I’d entered the random password that the package had given me at the time. A bit of research turned up this page, which described a PAM module (libpam-keyring) that would handle this for you, assuming that your password was the same as your login password. That’s great, and I installed it, but it didn’t help me fix the original password problem.

Finally I found the answer, in a comment near the bottom of this page: I deleted the file ~/ .gnome2/keyrings/default.keyring, then reconnected to the wireless network, and it asked me to set a new password for the default keyring. Problem solved.

I’m running out of challenges on Ubuntu. 🙂