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122 responses total.

I'd like to announce that Grex ended up having a very good month (moniwise)
in December.  Unfortunately our gains will be offset by that big payment to
Ameritech for our ISDN installation, but we should still come out ahead.

Treasurer's report to appear in a couple of days, when I get the bank
statement.

Uh, we aren't making that big payment to Ameritech, are we?  We should pay
what we owe, but not the in dispute amount.

I paid it, Steve.  I didn't want to deal with any more shutoff notices.
(See item:coop,63 for more info on the latest Ameritech squabble.)

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You sound almost like Martha Stewart in resp 4, Valerie. ;)

Oh dear.

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baking all those cookies has somehow.. alterered you, valerie.
<erinn backs away slowly>

The path between m-net and grex across the internet should have gotten
much faster now.  There are no congested links within the network
provider between the two folks doing connectivity  (cicnet/qualnet/iagnet)

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I notice my link to Grex from wwnet.net also goes over that new link. 
Cool.

I've installed a new release of the Backtalk Web conferencing system. 
Changes relevant to Grex are mostly bug fixes.  But there is also an
improved .cflist (aka "hotlist") editor, and users can now set their
timezones.

re #11 
That is correct.  Links from icnet, wwnet, provide.net and numerous other
internet providers go across these links.  Let me know if you see any
problems in that path.  By 3/1/98 the path should be even shorter.

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That is unrelated.

"It's a good thing."  d=

Er, that's Good Thing.

sure, what do you need help with?

All of the modems have been moved to the terminal server ("groupie").  This
means that you can now connect at 14.4!

Small difference:  When you dial in, you will get a "please wait for a
connection" message from the terminal server.  This does *not* mean you are
in the telnet queue, just that it takes a few seconds (up to a minute or so
when Grex is heavily loaded) to connect to Grex and get a login prompt. 
Eventually, we hope to have it set up so that when Grex is down, the terminal
server will display a message about Grex being down when you try to dial in.

(Special thanks to Marcus (mdw) for making it possible to have a telnet queue
and a terminal server coexist peacefully)

Oh, one more thing:

761-300 is now the number everybody should call.  No harm in using any other
numbers, but the speed is the same for all modems/phone lines.

You modem settings should (roughpy) be for error correcting on, data
compression on (these two may not apply to your modem, if you have an old on),
as fast as you want (our modems are all 14.4), 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop
bit.

Great!  Since my vintage-1992 software doesn't list 14400 as an option,
I assume I should set it for 9600 rather than something higher than
14400, such as 19200, right? 

That's -3000, right, Scott?

Re 22: Now that the ALM is out of the picture, I do not see why it would 
hurt to tell your modem software 19,200 or even faster.  Have you tried 
it?

If you have vintage 1988 hardware, you should select 9600.  If you have
newer hardware you should select 19200.  With anything that does error
correcting or compression, the effective speed varies depending on the
quality of the line and the amount of redundancy in the data.  It's
necessary to have flow control, to make things work reliably, and if you
have flow control, you don't need to match speeds exactly.

A 14.4 (or faster) modem will talk to the PC it is attached to at speeds up
to 56 or even 115k baud.  So 19.2k should be fine.

Thanks a lot, Scott and Marcus!  This is a great improvement.

Thanx, Marcus!  BTW, -3000 is not the best line for all occasions.
Just now I got an endless ring on -3000, but got right in on -4931.
Is this a bug or a feature?

Ameritech has to fix one of our lines, 761-9671.  It became dead a couple
weeks ago.  That might be part of the problem.  Also, next time count the
number of rings... dead modems are skipped after 2-3 rings.

Dave, it's called a trunk hunt.  I can't believe you don't know this after
years of using m-net and grex.

If a line is ringing open, it's not necessarily the one you dial. 
Unfortunately, there's no way for the trunk hunt to know that the line is
ringing open.  So you justh ave to dial down the trunk hunt until you get PAST
the open line...

Not true.  Because we have Centrex lines, we can (and do!) program the trunk
hunt to skip after X rings with no answer.  So if a modem dies, the hunt will
ring 2 or 3 times, then will move on to the next line in the hunt.  Of course,
if you give up after a couple rings you aren't letting that system do its job.

Also, if all the lines are in use except for the one that is ringing open,
I think it keeps ringing open rather than ringing a few times and then going
busy.

Anyhow, the line that was dead has been fixed.  There should not be open
ringing anymore.

I got three rings on 3000, waited, and connected.

So I changed it by remming it out:

# This line defines your pager.  Delete it if you want your text to scroll
# continuously; then use control-S and control-Q to pause and resume
scrolling.
# define pager "more -d"

I wonder if Ameriwreck messed up some of our lines when fixing the one
mentioned above (9671).  That might explain the dropped characters and
other stuff that people have been mentioning lately.

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What do you have for Macs?

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- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss