TR Forums

longleaf wrote:

Canuckle: Well it seems to be working fine with the two microfilters I've got. The phone line comes into my room literally about 10cm from the back of the computer, then it travels 10m before going on an extension of 10m back to my computer, cutting off 20m of normal phone wire would probably help my connection a bit I guess. I read somewhere that I can't hook anything up to my phone line before the first socket? Is this right, or can I just do it anyway?

I dunno about telco stuff, I'd heard of others having issues with dropped connections when answering the phone and such and it was cured by moving to a centralized POTS splitter.

Been a while - I got off DSL some time ago, didn't enjoy either of my two DSL ISPs or their support departments.

just brew it! wrote:

UberGerbil wrote:

It's also historical. Modems used to be 300kbps (that's bits) which would be 37kBps (bytes) which is kind of an odd, awkward number. ...

Minor nit: Should be 300bps and 37Bps, not kbps and kBps...

(I'm sure that's what you meant... )

D'oh! Yeah, that's what I meant. Funny how your fingers just type stuff and your eyes approve it without your brain getting involved in the process whatsoever. It would've been great to have 300k modems back then, instead of watching the the characters as they appeared....

UberGerbil wrote:

D'oh! Yeah, that's what I meant. Funny how your fingers just type stuff and your eyes approve it without your brain getting involved in the process whatsoever. It would've been great to have 300k modems back then, instead of watching the the characters as they appeared....

How many people here are old enough to have used the old electro-mechanical Teletype terminals? 110bps current-loop interface... mmm, the aroma of hot electrical equipment and oil... those were the days!

The DECWriter dot matrix terminal (which could operate at a blazing 300bps) was a vast improvement!

Trivia time: The original purpose of the NULL character was to pad the end of every line sent to the terminal, to give the mechanical carriage enough time to move back to column 1. IIRC the original Teletype terminals needed 3 NULLs (i.e. they took about 300ms to process a carriage-return). The penalty for leaving out the NULLs was that the first couple of characters from the next line would get smeared across the page, because they would get printed while the carriage was still in motion!

just brew it! wrote:

UberGerbil wrote:

D'oh! Yeah, that's what I meant. Funny how your fingers just type stuff and your eyes approve it without your brain getting involved in the process whatsoever. It would've been great to have 300k modems back then, instead of watching the the characters as they appeared....

How many people here are old enough to have used the old electro-mechanical Teletype terminals? 110bps current-loop interface... mmm, the aroma of hot electrical equipment and oil... those were the days!

The DECWriter dot matrix terminal (which could operate at a blazing 300bps) was a vast improvement!

Trivia time: The original purpose of the NULL character was to pad the end of every line sent to the terminal, to give the mechanical carriage enough time to move back to column 1. IIRC the original Teletype terminals needed 3 NULLs (i.e. they took about 300ms to process a carriage-return). The penalty for leaving out the NULLs was that the first couple of characters from the next line would get smeared across the page, because they would get printed while the carriage was still in motion!

My first computing experiences came in high school in the late 1970's pounding on a Teletype connected to a PDP-8. Ours still had the punch-tape reader/writer, which is how we submitted class assignments. We also had a DECWriter, upon which it was easy to make people think it was busted just by moving the baud switch from 300 to 110.

I'm not that old, lol. I remember being really excited when the 9.600kbps baud modem came out. I pestered my mum for one for ages, never got it though. I did have a dot matrix printer that I used to have on a wobbly table until it finally shook the table so badly it broke. I was pretty young but I seem to remember it being seriously heavy. The first computer I went on was an 086 I think at my aunties house (who taught IT in college) she then got a 286 with digger on it. that was one seriously addictive game, got frogger after that, even better than digger. At school they got 'brand new' BBC computers, no idea what they were based on but they were really sloooowwwww. That was back when apple was dying, I had an apple two for a little while, I think it was old even then,actually I've still got it! Does anyone know whether I can get it folding?

Someone earlier posted a message about PPPoE and also complaining about having to install filters on every phone. I find it hard to believe that I'm the only one who has done something like this, but here's how I've set up my wiring with SBC's DSL...

First, I have a linksys router that handles the PPPoE connection for me. I never see it or have to think about it. My connection is always on, as they advertize. Yeah, there is some overhead, but at 1.5Mbit, it's plenty fast for me. I don't notice it being slower than the 1.5Mbit T1 at work.

Second, as for wiring... my electric, phone, and cable all come into my house at one place in the basement. I have installed Ethernet jacks in the places in my house where I want data ports. The cabling all comes back to that one location in the basement, where my DSL modem and my router reside. Now... as for those pesky filters... I split the phone system connection immediately when it comes into the house. One leg goes directly to the DSL modem. The other leg goes to all the rest of the phone extensions. I have one single z-filter installed at that one point, so that it covers all of the phone jacks in my house.

So... with this setup, I'm completely satisfied with my DSL. $29.95 for 1.5Mbit, always on connection is a pretty good deal. It's never gone down in the year that I've had it. I don't have to think about filters on any of my phones, and I just plug my machines directly into a wall jack.

It doesn't get much cleaner than that!

-SF

It would make so much more sense for me to do that, as the phoneline comes into my house literally next to my computer. I might buy a kit and go for it, my DIY book says that I can't put an extra socket in before the original BT one though, I'll check that out and see I guess.

longleaf wrote:

It would make so much more sense for me to do that, as the phoneline comes into my house literally next to my computer. I might buy a kit and go for it, my DIY book says that I can't put an extra socket in before the original BT one though, I'll check that out and see I guess.

Sounds like a bureaucratic (as opposed to technical) issue to me. I.e., BT is probably legally responsible for maintaining the line as far as the first jack, so they don't want you messing with anything up to that point.

hhhmmmm your probably right, I'm wondering whether it's worth me risking their wrath if anything goe's wrong, while it might save me 20metres of cable and make my whole setup a lot neater, I'd be risking being charged a load of money if something went wrong.

AOL DSL is quite as bad as regular dial-up AOL. I'm not sure what the 1400 MTU thing is (I do know what MTU is, but why can't they use the standard?) and why they use it. Maybe so it's harder for people to hook routers to their service. The only thing I can imagine is that they expect people to try, fail, and give up without doing any research on how to get it to work. I'm a computer tech and it baffled me for a bit.

As for the AOL thing anyway. It was a customer who already had the equipment. For whatever reason they thought that switching from cable internet to AOL DSL would get rid of their spyware/adware pop-up problems. "Because AOL has built-in pop-up stoppers." Pop-up stoppers will, most of the time, do nothing about the adware ads. They really should have kept their cable service, but that wasn't my job that day. It was getting their router working.

Taddeusz wrote:

I'm not sure what the 1400 MTU thing is (I do know what MTU is, but why can't they use the standard?) and why they use it.

MTU isn't a standard; it's a measurement/setting used to stop packet fragmentation. And it's dependent on the router(s) between you and the destination because you get dropped to the lowest setting of what is encountered on that route.

Some would be likely to find a performance increase if they tweaked their MTU to the proper setting...

Ok, maybe I should state that differently. It just kind of bugged me that the AOL DSL setup is set to a lower than normal MTU. I think most routers are set to around 1500 by default. My Netgear router is set to 1500 and I get pretty damn good transfer rates. Cox's speed test site has gotten up to 4Mb downstream one time. And, yes, I clear my cache every time I run the test. At least in this area Cox is setting the standard residential rate at 3Mb. DSL, AFAIK, is still going at 1.5Mb and I wonder if that rate is even achieved at some of the places I've been.

Taddeusz wrote:

I think most routers are set to around 1500 by default. My Netgear router is set to 1500 and I get pretty damn good transfer rates.

The only way to know for sure is to do MTU testing, which is dependent on the route taken - it isn't always the same route.

Cox's speed test site has gotten up to 4Mb downstream one time. And, yes, I clear my cache every time I run the test. At least in this area Cox is setting the standard residential rate at 3Mb. DSL, AFAIK, is still going at 1.5Mb and I wonder if that rate is even achieved at some of the places I've been.

Speed tests and clearing cache's doesn't mean you are doing MTU testing. The only method I'm aware of is to set the MTU on a ping and watch for fragmentation...

Also, speed of broadband is dependent on what your ISP will allow you - Doesn't matter if it's DSL or Cable, it's still them capping you either at the station or via your modem. Speed has NOTHING to do with being cable or DSL.

Surely they wouldnt cap your speed at your modem? you could just use another modem and you'd have a faster connection speed and not be paying for it?

longleaf wrote:

Surely they wouldnt cap your speed at your modem? you could just use another modem and you'd have a faster connection speed and not be paying for it?

Actually, they often do cap the speed at the modem. They can monitor how much bandwidth you use... if you hack around the cap, they cancel your account. (If they're paying attention...)

just brew it! wrote:

Actually, they often do cap the speed at the modem. They can monitor how much bandwidth you use... if you hack around the cap, they cancel your account. (If they're paying attention...)

Oh they do - mine didn't like me downloading 10 Gigs... a day

[Get your minds out of the gutter - it was my roommate who was grabbing XBox games off newsgroups.]

[Get your minds out of the gutter - it was my roommate who was grabbing XBox games off newsgroups.]

Yeah sure,

I got a letter from my ISP this time last year concerning my use of bandwidth, it was only a modem, they said they just wanted to draw my attention to the fact that my modem seemed to be downloading noon and night only pausing for a few seconds every 2hours to disconnect and reconnect. I left the old version of DAP downloading MP3's for three weeks solid while I was on holiday, took me a while to get it setup but when I did there was nothing to beat it. failed download, it tries again and again and again, it just carried on for ever, or untill it ran out of files to download, cant remember how many files it downloaded, but it was aroung 6GB, in three weeks on a modem! Why oh why did they have to change it?

just brew it! wrote:

longleaf wrote:

Surely they wouldnt cap your speed at your modem? you could just use another modem and you'd have a faster connection speed and not be paying for it?

Actually, they often do cap the speed at the modem. They can monitor how much bandwidth you use... if you hack around the cap, they cancel your account. (If they're paying attention...)

What about if you just bought a faster modem and claimed you didnt know any better? that way if they are paying attention then your in the clear, if not then hello more bandwidth less ££$$.

They can actually reprogram your modem without you knowing. If for some reason you need a firmware upgrade they do it. None of the cable modem distributors, AFAIK, publicly distrubute firmware upgrades. This also ties into the capping issue. You actually download new firmwares to uncap your cable modem.

Personally I'm quite happy with my 3Mb/400kb. I'm not planning to run a web site or FTP server other than every once in a while.

FTP servers are an interesting thing too. I have a friend on Roadrunner in San Diego. He tries to setup an FTP server and I can't get to it. I run an FTP server and he can get to mine fine. Roadrunner is apparently blocking the incoming FTP requests to his computer. Roadrunner apparently claims not to block, just to monitor, but I suspect they are blocking it. Cox has a short list of ports it blocks, mostly for trojan horses and worms. They do block SMTP, though, except through their own mail servers.

Try using passive mode FTP, if you aren't already. Sometimes that will get around firewalls / blocked ports. Normal FTP is kind of a squirrely protocol, and can run into trouble if a firewall isn't specifically configured to support it.

Sometimes that will get around firewalls / blocked ports.

JBI = MasterHacker, responsible for Red Alert, MS Blast and the recent spate of on-line fraud involving peoples bank accounts.

longleaf wrote:

Sometimes that will get around firewalls / blocked ports.

JBI = MasterHacker, responsible for Red Alert, MS Blast and the recent spate of on-line fraud involving peoples bank accounts.

LOL...

Nah, it is just a goofy side effect of how "classic" FTP protocol works. The client contacts the server with the request, and the server "calls you back"... some routers/firewalls block the "callback", because they interpret it as an intrusion attempt. Passive mode FTP gets around this by behaving more like a normal client-server protocol (i.e. all TCP/IP activity is explicitly initiated by the client side).

IIRC web browsers use passive mode FTP by default (not sure)? I think it is mainly an issue for command-line FTP clients...

just brew it! wrote:

IIRC web browsers use passive mode FTP by default (not sure)? I think it is mainly an issue for command-line FTP clients...

In IE, you have to toggle this from Tools > Internet Options > Advanced.