[gentoo-user] rfcomm0 interface missing

[Mick]

After more than a year I tried to tether my mobile to my laptop to connect to 
GPRS using kppp.  I noticed that kppp hangs and I have to kill it, while it 
hangs with "Modem Ready".  I can query the modem successfully using kppp, and 
it responds to ATI initialisation commands, so now I am trying to understand 
what is wrong with it and why the connection does not complete.

ifconfig -a does not show rfcomm0, but this may be because it never completes 
the connection to my mobile phone provider's network, so the ppp link is not 
established.

I can see that the rfcomm device is being created:

# ls -la /dev/rfcomm*
crw-rw---- 1 root uucp 216, 0 Nov 17 15:51 /dev/rfcomm0

and it does try to connect until it freezes showing "Modem Ready", but I am 
getting no more errors to know what to do next.

I was thinking that this may be related to the udev NIC renaming change that 
happened within the last year.  However, I never had any udev rules to manage 
rfcomm and from what I recall vaguely when the udev update came, I had no 
problem connecting  (but memory may be failing me after all this time).  It 
could of course be related to my mobile phone providers settings - I haven't 
changed these for a long time and looking on the Internet I can't find if they 
are any different now.

How should I troubleshoot this further?

Could someone please hold my hand to set up ppp so that I can avoid kppp and 
its freezing behaviour?
-- 
Regards,
Mick