Re: [cobalt-users] Repeated Dial-up Connections... why?

[Mike Vanecek <nospam99@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have a couple of Qube2's, but am not using a dialup modem to connect.
However, you may want to look at a couple of things that might help:

/usr/admserv/cgi-bin/.cobalt/modemOut/modemOut.cgi

/usr/admserv/cgi-bin/.cobalt/modemUsage/modemUsage.cgi

/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/auto/Cobalt/Modem/  has a bunch of scripts too.

These are Cobalt's cgi's for the GUI interface. Seeing how they are setup may
give you some hints as to how things work.

/usr/lib/diald/connect is a connection script, but I am not sure the Qube2
uses it.

One of the problems I have run into in learning how the Qube2 functions is
trying to figure out what standard Linux stuff is or is not used by the Cobalt
GUI installation.

Do a locate modem for a full set.

On Sun, 14 May 2000 03:05:29 -0500, Rodolfo Paiz <rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

:>OK... after only a couple of days with my Qube, here is the first stumper
:>I've run into:
:>
:>Finally troubleshot (the past tense of troubleshoot, if indeed that exists)
:>the external modem I'm using while my cable gets set up. Turned out to be a
:>bad serial cable, ugh. Now I have a curiosity:
:>
:>The Qube 2 is sharing a modem connection among four computers on a LAN. The
:>Qube does primary DNS and DHCP; my ISP does secondary DNS. Everything seems
:>to work in that, when requesting Internet content from another computer, the
:>Qube dials and then dispenses the data. But, I do run into three concerns
:>that I have not been able to resolve:

One thing you might consider is putting both the primary and secondary DNS on
the ISP (they will have different name servers for that). That puts the name
server load on the ISP rather than on your relatively slow connection to the
Qube. You could then turn off DNS service on the Qube. A wild guess here, but
maybe that will force the Qube2 to dial faster since it needs to connect to
the external name server??

:>
:>* Most of the time the clients time-out on the first try because it takes
:>too long to get the PPP link up. Then on the second try everything's fine.
:>But of course, when I'm not doing this by hand and the computers want to get
:>something from the Internet themselves, it's no good. Does anybody have a
:>suggestion as to how I could improve this? The Qube 2 GUI does not really
:>have any configuration settings for the modem. Or should I be looking for a
:>way to improve the timeout behavior on the Windows clients? Sigh...

If you are doing a tcp lan connection to the Qube2 from the client, I am not
sure where one would change the timeout settings. Me thinks the better
approach is try to get the Qube2 connection more efficient.

:>
:>* How do I set the time-out period of idleness before the Qube hangs up the
:>modem connection? I only have one phone line, and in my country we currently
:>pay our telephone by the minute.

Cannot help you there, maybe the scripts or another user will. See my sign
below for a Qube2 list too.

:>* The modem connects very frequently, and I don't know why. This is driving
:>my wife insane, since she can hear it most of the time, but it's also
:>costing me a fair amount of cash on my phone bill. Is there any way I can
:>log the traffic routed by the Qube, so I can figure out why the modem
:>connected, and how to make it stop...?

The nature of windows networking is that about once an hour (see the  NBT
SessionKeepAlive registry parameter that defaults to once per hour)
workstations go out and ask who is still active. Just guessing here, but could
that be triggering the periodic dialup? Also, you have some crontab activities
that might be doing things (ntp time sync for example, checking for email,
etc.). Maybe the scripts I reference above will give you some ideas.

  /snip/


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