Problems Using SLIP/PPP

Many users have been experiencing problems using the SLIP/PPP feed. The most common problem has been that the connection to the feed is established with little or no difficulty, but attempts to do anything result in error messages such as "Host not found", "Could not lookup host", and similar errors.

These are the currently known problems and solutions:

• It has been found that modems that use the Rockwell Interface Protocol (RPI) to achieve data compression are incompatible with the SLIP/PPP software package that Alachua Freenet distributes.

  These modems (made by a variety of different companies including Supra, Zolotex, and others) are high-speed modems, but do not have the data compression hardware that normal high-speed modems do. They instead rely on special software, such as custom terminal programs or special drivers. Because the SLIP/PPP software for PC's is Windows based, and doesn't include RPI support, those modems fail to work with the SLIP/PPP feed. The solution is to disable the modem's data compression and/or RPI support. Try using one these initialization strings:

  	              	%C0+H0
  			\N6\Q3\J0\V1
  

  Different brands of modems may use different commands. If one of those do not work (they are Supra 144i commands), consult your modem documentation for information on how to disable data compression and/or RPI support. Look for keywords such as "Data Compression", "Rockwell Support", "RPI", and "Rockwell Interface Protocol".

  If your modem has no way of disabling this feature, it maybe that you will have to obtain a non-RPI modem that uses full hardware data compression. These tend to be around $99-$119.

  NOTE!
  Not all Supra brand modems use RPI. Supra makes quality modems with full hardware data compression and other support as well. Also very important, if your modem *does* support hardware data compression, than disabling it will probably not fix the problem (though it won't hurt anything).

• It has also been found that many of those with 2400 baud modems seem to have problems using the SLIP/PPP software. It is not known for sure if this is due to the slow speed of 2400 baud modems.

• Finally, sometimes the server that acts as the nameserver for the SLIP/PPP users crashes. If you wish, you can change the Nameserver (DNS) setting in your SLIP/PPP software to use 128.227.184.15 instead of the 128.227.163.5 server.

  How:

  1. Go into the File menu of the Trumpet program
  2. Select "Setup".
  3. Erase the numbers in the
  4. Name server field
  5. Enter the 128.227.184.15 number
  6. Click the "OK" button.

7/8/95
--jtr

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