[ale] Which OS for PPP to ISP?

[Douglas Todd]

A good starting point for Diald is the exelent talk that
David Snyder gave at one of the ALE meetings. He has notes
on his home page, which can be reached at

www.mindspring.com/~dsnyder


It's well worth setting up.

Also, I understand that the next revision of pppd may support demand
dialing. Looking forward to it soon.

Doug.


Martin B. Brilliant wrote:
> 
> I've been told that this mailing list recently covered the topic of
> communication with Internet Service Providers, and I need some advice
> on that subject.
> 
> I use PPP to my ISP for mail, news, www, and ftp. For mail and news
> I want the connection down most of the time, while I'm reading and
> composing, and up only to transfer messages. For www and ftp the
> connection must be up all the time. I also want to do other things
> during ftp downloads. And I have to choose one operating system to
> do this in, because you can't reboot in the middle of ftp.
> 
> I've been using MS-Windows for about two years, and Linux for about
> two weeks, so I know Windows better than Linux. Windows, with Trumpet
> Winsock and the apps that know and use it, is fine for jacking the
> connection up and down on demand. But ftp transfers stop and start,
> or end prematurely, because Windows can't do preemptive multitasking.
> Linux is great at multitasking during ftp. But as far as I can tell,
> its mail and news programs can't deal with PPP links that go up and
> down, because they were written for UNIX, which is designed for
> full-time communications.
> 
> Am I missing something? It looks to me as though I will have to give
> up one of my objectives, either part-time connections or full
> multitasking - unless Linux has capabilities I don't know about.
> 
>                                                 Marty
> Martin B. Brilliant at home in Holmdel, NJ