Bluetooth GPRS and dial-up Internet config

Hi folks,

Since I got my PowerBook I've been fairly snowed under learning my way
around, getting everything set up, transferring stuff from my old RISC
OS computer, etc, so I've not had time to participate here. Hope you
didn't miss me too much.

At the moment, I'm trying to configure all my Internet connections in
the various "locations" and I'm stuck on a few things that must have
been encountered by other people here.

The first is that I intend to go travelling with my laptop and want my
UK dial-up accounts to work whichever country I'm in. On my Psion
netBook (and in my mobile's address book, for that matter) I just enter
+44 followed by the number without the leading zero. This then works
from anywhere in the world. However, after entering the dial-up number
in this format in the PPP settings window in System Preferences, the
built-in modem gives out a constant tone which I assume indicates that
the number was invalid and fails to connect. I can get it to work if I
put double zero in place of the plus sign, but that will only work from
countries that actually use double zero as the prefix for international
numbers. I notice that within the "Modem" tab of the dial-up settings
there is a button to change the "Country Setting" which leads me to
believe that MacOSX does handle international dialling (in some way
that's less than intuitive). What is the correct country-neutral way to
enter international phone numbers?

The second problem is how to set up a connection to my Samsung mobile so
that I can fetch/send email while on the move. I'd like to set up both a
direct dial and a GPRS connection so that I can use whichever suits the
situation. Frankly, all my experiments with this got nowhere, and (as
usual) there is nothing useful in Help. I would be very grateful for any
detailed explanations of which settings to fill out and with what values
in which windows. Many MacOSX dialogue windows have poorly labelled
fields, for example a name field which could be any one of: the name of
the connection for display purposes only, the ISP account username for
authorisation purposes, the GPRS network username, the mobile network
name (Vodafone in my case), the Bluetooth device name, or a multitude of
other possibilities, but MacOSX Help rarely says anything more than
"Enter the name in the name field". Aaargh! (I'm convinced MacOSX Help
is auto generated from the window definitions because there's no
evidence of human intelligence.)

Thirdly, while experimenting I created several extraneous err...
"Network Port Configurations" as Apple ambiguously call them, and the
Delete button in that preference windows only unticks them, it doesn't
actually delete them at all. I managed to track down the location of
these settings to the file:

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist

and, using the PropertyListEditor app, I can see that it contains quite
a bit of crud that probably ought to be tidied up, if only I dared
fiddle with it. Is there is a proper *user* way to remove the extraneous
"Port Configurations", etc, or will I need to hack about in this plist
file?

If anyone can help, or give pointers to somewhere I can get help for any
of these problems, then I'd be very grateful indeed. Thanks.

PS. This is my first post using MacSOUP, so if it mucks up some aspect
of the formatting, please forgive me. Not sure I like MacSOUP much. I
intend to check out the other newsreaders just as soon as I get a round
tuit.

--
James Taylor <james (at) oakseed.demon.co.uk>
.

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