[Plug] Anyone using diald?

Is anyone successfully using diald with Debian? I'm trying to get it set up, and it initializes OK, but when it tries to connect to my ISP it horks on the chat script. I can't seem to run chat manually either, even when running as root. /dev/modem is correctly symlinked to the proper serial port, and pppd doesn't have any problem using it. I'm wondering if its some subtle user/group ID thing (pppd is setuid root), or some unreported lockfile-contention thing (although I tail -f /var/log/messages, and all I see is "diald[pid]: Running connect / diald[pid]: connect script failed"). When I run chat manually, I seem to get absolutely no response from the modem, as if it's not even opening the port (although I don't get an open failure). The man pages I've got are pretty clue-deficient with regards to debugging a non-working connection.