Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rice!uw-beaver!ubc-cs!van-bc!sl From: sl@van-bc.wimsey.bc.ca (Stuart Lynne) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.modems Subject: Re: PPP for KA9Q (was SLIP) Message-ID: <236@van-bc.wimsey.bc.ca> Date: 12 Nov 90 10:38:44 GMT References: <1990Nov6.043231.3859@larouch.uucp> <9234@aggie.ucdavis.edu> Organization: USENET Public Access, Vancouver, B.C., Canada Lines: 37 In article greg@cheers.Bungi.COM (Greg Onufer) writes: >ccruss@pollux (Russ Hobby) writes: > >>funds. I know that a 9600 baud link to the Internet doesn't sound like >>much, but their other option is nothing at all [[...]]] > >It really isn't all that bad except that the downtime is ridiculous. >It's almost like when darkness falls, so does the PPP connection to >ucdavis. They reboot the PC on their end, and up it comes again--- >but that only happens when someone is there (normal business hours). >The past few weekends the PPP connection went bad for the whole Of course it doesn't have to be that bad. On van-bc we have a cron script that test's that we can ping the router at the far end of our PPP link (formerly SL/IP). If we can't we reboot the router, which drop's DTR which hangs the phone, then when the router comes back up DTR is raised which causes the modem to redial, and the connection is re-established. Our phone lines are quite noisy and typically it will redial once or twice a day. Do that every ten minutes and you have a good chance of even keeping ftp connections going over a reboot. BTW kudo's to Phil Karn and the UCDavis people for the new ka9q with PPP. It seems to be rock solid. SCO Xenix TCP/IP seems to like to play with it. So far our subjective opinion is that running PPP on PC-Routers (with VJ header compression) is definitely a step up and much more solid than running host based SL/IP. We won't go back! One question: does anyone have any opinions on whether it's better to use raw V.32, V.32+MNP, V.32+MNP+compression, or PEP for PPP/VJ type links. Adding MNP will presumably inrease latency over raw V.32. Compression a bit more but might help if lot's of compressable traffic (like a full news feed via nntp). -- Stuart Lynne Unifax Communications Inc. ...!van-bc!sl 604-937-7532(voice) sl@wimsey.bc.ca