SOLVED! Thanks -Changed modems and dial up slowed to a craaaawwwwl

[DamselNDistress]

Running Fedora Core 3 on a Compac Armada 1750 with surprising success - about 6 months in and I'm devoted to linux!

Anyway, I spilled wine on my modem. I know. :-\ It's dead. And I liked it. It was blue.

So I purchased a refurbished US Robotics Courier V. Everything on eBay. Software upgraded to v.92, so it should be "up to speed." 12 hours, two temper tantrums, and one full operating system reload later, and it's working! But it's very, very slow.

I've changed, I think, the speed settings for both the modem and the serial port using minicom and kppp. I googled and found out how to check the serial speed, thinking this might be my trouble, got:

[root@localhost betsey]# setserial -a /dev/ttyS0
/dev/ttyS0, Line 0, UART: 16550A, Port: 0x03f8, IRQ: 4
Baud_base: 115200, close_delay: 500, divisor: 0
closing_wait: 30000
Flags: spd_normal skip_test auto_irq

which I think looks fine. This is just normal old 56K dial up, the ONLY thing available at my lovely home in the pastoral middle of no-blooming-where.

Any suggestions?

And please, be nice to the newbie and if you give me instructions make them very clear. Please do not assume that I know anything. Thanks for your help!

Oh -- and I have tweaked Firefox with changes to the config thingy (pipelining & requests), with no discernable difference. I see a big slowdown in both browser and email (Thunderbird).

kppp says I'm connected at 9600 bpm.

[redhead]

kppp says I'm connected at 9600 bpm.

That's rather slow.. I suspect it to be in the negotiation with your ISP, when the modem is negotiating on what speed your provider supports and what speed your modem supports, if none compares it will select lowes possible, which 9600bpm is (besides from 1400, but thats like 20 years ago)

A bit of googling showed there could be problems with a leased line on your type of modems (described close to the bottom) A leased line is exactly what you have, every connection initiated with a dialup account usualy turns out to be leased line.

[DamselNDistress]

Well, most if not all of that went right over my head. I'm thinking that the solution is 1 - get yet another modem and keep my fingers crossed or 2 - move to a place in the real world where cable or DSL is available. We're planning #2 in the hopefully near future anyway, so I guess I'll just put up with it for now.

[DamselNDistress]

I reconfigured (sounds a lot fancier than just clicking "configure) kppp to a lower speed - and have increased to 28800 bpm. I think I can live with this. Thanks for the help, y'all. :-*

[Coral_Sea]

Were you able to test your refurbished modem on a Windows PC? That would tell you if it's a modem or an operating system problem.

[Schotty]

I would try setting it to 56k and see what happens. 115K should be OK, but apparently isn't. Try going to 56k, then to the highest and work your way down. Hardware USR's are fantastic and have phenomenally great support in linux.