[9fans] problems with telco

[9fans] problems with telco

[William Staniewicz]

I have been using telco to dial in to my ISP but notice
a few quirks that I have not been able to get around. First,
I should say that I know how to dial in without telco using
ip/ppp -uf ... but prefer getting authenticated without having
to watch for the connection and use the <ctrl-d> every time.

Normally to dial in I use the following procedure:

term% telco '#t/eia1'

	(There is about a 10 second pause here. Why does
	 it take so long?)

term% ip/ppp -fP -m 576 -p telco!0,5551212 -s $host:$pass

	Now at this point a get a message that pops up in
	rio. It tells me it is dialing out. Any way to get
	this to appear in the rc window because the only way
	to get rid of it is to move a window across rio and
	it disappears then. Also, why again is there a 10
	second pause? Any way to speed this up?

The authentication usually goes through OK so no complaints here.
However, when I decide to disconnect I usually go through the
following:

	kill ftpfs|rc
	(I engage this to keep the connection alive to my ISP)
	kill listen|rc
	kill dns|rc
	kill ppp|rc
	(I have no problem with these.)
	kill telco|rc

Now having done all this, I decide to log on again with telco:

	term% telco '#t/eia1'

The following message pops in to rio:

	"create of /srv/telco failed"

		and

The following message pops into the rc window:

	"srv file already exists"

Then the window crashes after about 5 seconds.

At first I thought this was happening because I was not
properly unmounting, so I tried both:

	term% unmount telco
		or
	term% unmount /srv/telco

But I get the message about it NOT being mounted on both
these. I looked at /srv and saw telco there, so doesn't
that mean it is mounted?

Note: After the window crashes I can usually do a 'telco '#t/eia1''
again without a problem. It's just a little annoying I have to
walk through the whole process every time.

Any ideas or suggestions to get around these?
(Other than getting a leased line?)

Bill

Re: [9fans] problems with telco

[Richard Miller]

>	(There is about a 10 second pause here. Why does
>	 it take so long?)

Because when telco starts or dials, it first probes the modem to find out
what type it is.  (In case you have changed hardware since last time you
dialled ... ?)  You can make this probe quicker by two tweaks to
/sys/src/cmd/telco/telco.c:

 - reordering the array typetab[] so that the definition of your own modem
   comes second (don't put it first because that's the generic fallback
   entry which is used if no other probe succeeds)
 - speeding up the attention() routine by inserting at the beginning
	if(apply(d, "ATZH0", 0, 2) == Ok)
		return Ok;
   you could also experiment with reducing the sleep(250) calls to
   something like sleep(50)

>	Now at this point a get a message that pops up in
>	rio. It tells me it is dialing out.

You need to create the file /sys/log/telco -- that's where this message should
be going.  If you start telco with argument '-v', /sys/log/telco will also
have lots of other logging messages to show you why it takes so long.

>	kill listen|rc
>	kill dns|rc

You don't need to kill these.  They will cope with ppp coming and going.

>	kill telco|rc

You certainly shouldn't kill telco.  Just leave it running all the
time.  It will hang up the phone when you kill ppp.  (It will even receive
faxes for you -- look at /bin/service/telcofax to see what it does with
them.)

>	"srv file already exists"

If you ever do kill telco, you must also 'rm /srv/telco' before starting
it again.

-- Richard Miller