Access and use

[John Johnson]

On Sat, 4 Apr 1998, John O. Perry wrote:

> Am I the only user who has found that access (via ICOMM) is much easier 
> of late (no more No Answers, or running through 12 tries without success)
> and that when on line, there are no more abrupt disconnects or 
> intolerable slow scrolls?   ....

Or you just got lucky!  (Smile!)

Which is partly true.  Unfortunately, things are not all fixed with the
modems, and even as I write this we have two modems apparently hung. 
(Can't do a thing about them until the library opens.)  And a week ago
Monday we had a modem not answering, and we left it up for several hours
to test it.   Such is life.

But we have made some progress.  The pausing problem, for instance, was
traced to five modems with a particular PROM version, and we moved them
out of the main hunt-group to the IP lines, where we could keep a better
eye on them.  Then they started going into gibberish mode (and some of the
IPs started complaining!). This (the gibberish) we found to be related to
problems with error control and possibly compression.  (From the news
groups we learn that USRobotics has had some serious problems in their
implmentation of the V.42 error corrrection protocol.) 

No thanks to USRobotics, though.  There seem to be serious problems with
both their Sportster modems and their support operations.  So the
Hardware/Software committee is considering options for replacing them.
And when we reach a point where there seems not further benefit to
testing these modems, we will try to arrange things to minimize the
various problems.

=== JJ =================================================================



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