Quote Originally Posted by lothario
(DSL is too expensive in this area and high speed is not necessary.)

I need recommendations on a plain old analog Dial up modem that:
1. Is known to work with Knoppix.
2. Is an external analog modem.
3. Saves the dial-up number, user id and password in the modem ONLY.
4. Has an ethernet port.

This way any Knoppix PC (with LAN card) can connect to the analog modem's ethernet port.
The analog modem should dial out on demand.
I don't want to save this Dial-up information on the PC because the users bring different (versions of) Knoppix Live CDs.

Any recommendations?

These users utilize their Knoppix Live CDs to basically do text chat and occasional email checking.
What you're asking for does not exist, as far as I know, in just a modem. But you should be able to combine a standard external modem and a router with dial-up modem fall-back to acomplish this. As long as the high speed port isn't connected to anything, the router should fall back to the dial-up modem and use that connection. The dial-up number, ID and password would be in the router, not the modem, but with a little duct tape one could make a single device that he called his external ethernet based modem that would fit the discription. The device can be used by multiple systems at once (although it will not be fast considering the dial-up modem, but that's already a given). As a side benefit, when you are ready to go high speed you just plug in the high speed connection and you are good to go. I believe Mutlitech and SMC both make routers with this fallback feature, I would expect the SMC to be more reasonably priced. Others may make them too, it's worth shopping around.

But while you consider high speed access too expensive, you may want to consider how much you are going to pay for just the hardware to stay with last century's technology. I don't know about the area that you plan to use this in, but where I am located there is now a "DSL Lite" that costs little more than I used to pay for dial-up access, and while the bandwidth isn't great it's much much better than dial-up and doesn't tie up the telephone line (so you can afford to use the connection all day and night if needed for that big download). And such a service will work with any of the dirt cheap routers on the market now, no need for a router with a special fall-back feature. I would at least do a little homework to try to determine what high speed services are expected to roll out in the intended location in the next few months before springing for both a fall-back router and an external modem to do this your way.