[SWLUG] Speedtouch DSL modem

[Foeh Mannay]

Hi,

Reading what you say about load reminds me of when I was still using my
USB modem (based on the speedtouch setup I think, it was a Fujitsu). As
you are, I was too tight to replace it with a router until I got given
one. I digress...

What I found was that burning CDs and generally doing any semi-hefty
disk IO (restarting X for example) would send the modem drivers South.
Incidentally, I noticed that hdparm wasn't able to turn on DMA mode on
the hard drive either. As it turned out, when I recompiled the kernel
for all the trash eciadsl needed to work, I'd omitted the hard drive
controller for my machine and it was using generic code to control it.
Once I'd recompiled it with the appropriate hard disk controller ticked,
DMA mode worked again and I was able to use the ADSL without issue.

Dunno if that applies to you, but perhaps fiddling with hdparm could
give you some insight?

I can't see the MTU being the source of your problems as that wouldn't
cause the connection to drop completely.

Foeh


On Sun, 2004-12-19 at 20:32, Adam Rykala wrote:
> On Sunday 19 December 2004 20:16, Paul G. Richardson wrote:
> > Adam,
> >
> > Just gone over to a router but was using a P166 Box, running Smoothwall
> > with Speedtouch USB off the back of it with NIC card to connect to my
> > internal network. Work like a charm and only rarely had problems when
> > the "Bread Knife" decided that she was in too much of a hurry to
> > shutdown Smoothwall properly so just pressed the power button instead.
> > Still solved this by finding the offending lock file on the box and
> > deleting it.
> >
> > Regards
> >
> > Paul
> 
> I've only just gone over to DSL (exchange was activated in Nov) and so I'm 
> still feeling around - it seems as if the machine gets very silly load the 
> line drops.... Sometimes its a sod to get back up...
> 
> I've toyed between
> 
> 1) Replacing the USB modem with a router///
> 2) Mucking with Diald to automate
> 3) Just living with it as its not a major problem ;-)
> 
> a