[H-GEN] Optus at Home problems

[Paul Gearon]

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On Sat, 9 Jun 2001, Frank Brand wrote:

> I have a friend with computer running cable with Optus at Home.
>
> The computer runs fine when he is not connected to the Optus cable.
> However, once he plugs in the connection (seems to be a USB
> connection...not through an ethernet card) his machine starts to hang
> - he might get 15 minutes of operation or maybe an hour but it hangs
> regularly.

I'm assuming this is a Linux system?  If so, then the USB driver may be a
little buggy.  Actually, it has just as much chance of bringing down a
Windoze box, os I shouldn't be discriminatory.  :-)

Do you have a spare NIC you can lend him to see if this fixes the problem?
A 10baseT is probably OK given that it's only talking to a cable modem.

> Also, he was able to get mp3,s easily using Napster but when he tries
> various ftp clients he always gets a report that the remote host was
> unable to be found. Does Optus disable ftp ports?

Someone else mentioned that they don't, but I'm wondering if they do
transparent proxying?  If so, then many proxies aren't properly set up to
do FTP.  If he knows what he's doing you could get him to try using a
command line ftp and see how far he gets with that.  If it lets him log
in, but not get any data (eg. get, mget, ls, dir) then try setting the
mode to PASSIVE.  If that fixes it, then it's definately a proxy problem.
Passive mode won't help him with Netscape or Mozilla, but it will help
with wget.  :-)

Regards,
Paul Gearon

Software Engineer                Telephone:   +61 7 3876 2188
Plugged In Software              Fax:         +61 7 3876 4899
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