On Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 06:11:46PM -0700, Darrell Bellerive wrote: > I will soon be moving into a house in the rural country. Nice place > except no ADSL or cable Internet services. Until I can get a wireless link > going, I will be forced to use dial-up Internet access. Residents in the > area report speeds of 26,000 bps are the norm.
Ouch, 26k. Make sure you have the telephone company condition the line for internet-- that's what's been done for the line I use for a data line, and I get 52-53 K vs. 26-32 on the unconditioned line. > I will be using a 3COM/US Robotics external Courier modem (model # > 3CP3453) connected to a serial port to hopefully get a reliable link. Good modem-- I have that model or one similar to it, and it's served me well for 3 years now. :) > Can anyone share some tips, tricks, or favorite applications to increase > the useability of a dial-up Internet connection? > > My Internet needs are very simple: email, web cerfing, and keeping my Debian > stable system up to date. As others have said, fetchmail is handy (I use fetchmail with postfix/procmail/spamassassin for delivery and spam filtering, but that's not entirely necessary-- fetchmail can just use procmail to deliver, iirc.), update/upgrade overnight (I'd recommend keeping the system running Sarge-- less updates that way), and set pppd to use autoreconnect. If your bandwidth is really low, (and if you don't always need to see graphics on webpages) a text browser (lynx, links, etc.) loads faster than mozilla/firebird/etc. One thing people have told me (which I haven't tried yet, so I can't give a firsthand opinion on) is to run a proxy because pages that you go to often load faster. As I said, I haven't used any, so I can't give a recommendation. That's all I can think of for now. HTH. -- Vikki Roemer Homepage: http://neuromancer.homelinux.com/ Registered Linux user #280021 http://counter.li.org/ Harry Tasker: "Ask me a question I would normally lie to." Helen Tasker: "Are we going to die?" Harry Tasker: "Yep!" -- "True Lies" PGP fingerprint: 0A3E 0AE4 CCD9 FF31 B4BB C859 2DE1 B1D8 5CE0 1578 Keyserver: http://pgp.mit.edu/ -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GAT d---(-) s: a19 C++++(++) UL++++ P+ L+++>++++ E- W++ N+ o? K- w--() O? M? V?(-) PS+(+++) PE(++) Y+ PGP++ t+@ 5 X+ R*(?) tv-- b+++(++) DI+ D--(?) G e-(*)>+++++ h! r x* ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
