Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decvax!decwrl!pyramid!voder!kontron!brad
From: brad@kontron.UUCP (Brad Yearwood)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.modems
Subject: Twas the night before Xmas, and our modem ripped us off
Message-ID: <1839@kontron.UUCP>
Date: 12 Apr 88 07:05:53 GMT
Organization: Kontron Electronics, Mt. View, CA
Lines: 19

I was just reviewing phone bills to try to see what Usenet might be
costing us and so on, and discovered, to my horror, a call of
2912 minutes (!) beginning on the night of December 24 from Mountain
View to a New York site that we occasionally connect to.  The total
cost of this modem misadventure was about $450.

At the moment, I don't see any good way to track this back to its
cause.  Perhaps our system crashed hard during, say, the login
sequence for a uucp connect, and the destination system didn't
hang up their line after too long without successful login.

Question is, does anybody make any sort of cheap sanity timer that can
be interposed between a modem and the phone line?  Just something simple
and utterly reliable to go back on-hook after a selectable time (1, 2, 3
hours) off-hook would not bother typical legitimate uucp transfers, but
would prevent senseless waste like the above.

Brad Yearwood
Kontron Electronics  {voder, pyramid}!kontron!brad
Mountain View, CA