Re: Does anyone care about dialup?

[Indulekha <indulekha@theunworthy.com>]

On Wed, May 09, 2012 at 04:22:45PM +0200, Wilko Fokken wrote:
> On Mon, May 07, 2012 at 07:50:33PM -0500, Indulekha wrote:
> 
> > I live in a very remote rural area, so dialup is my only option.
> > Someone else suggested wvdial, which works and is good, but I prefer 
> > to use pppconfig to create the connection, pon/poff to start/end it, 
> > and pppstatus so I can see how many curse words and which ones are 
> > appropriate when waiting for things to download. 
> > 
> >  Indulekha 
> 
> Moin,
> 
> I am living the same way in rural Germany.
> 
> With Lenny, using 'pppconfig', I am having no problems with dialup
> connections, except:
> 
>  After running 'pppconfig' to install a new dialup connection to a
>  provider, I need to enter the directory
> 
>     /etc/ppp/peers/
> 
>  and have to change the group of my new dialup entries to 'dip':
> 
> 	chown root:dip <provider>
>

I'd forgotten, but that was necessary here as well.

> --------------------------------
> 
> 
> Unfortunately, I can't find a provider anymore, who provides a constant
> dialup connection: They all switch their connection parameters regularly,
> so that a cheap dialup connection suddenly turns into a altered connection
> with costs up to 15 cents/min.
> 
> Therefore I wrote some shell scripts in order to protect myself from
> monetary hassle relying on data given under
> 
>  www.teltarif.de
> 
> 
> As my shell scripts qualify as "private-alpha", I put just a few lines
> here to give an overview of actual cheap German dialup connections:
> 
> #############################################################################
> #! /bin/sh
> 
> # Get an overview of cheap dialup connections in Germany from www.teltarif.de
> # ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> # (Note: requires an already working internet access)
> 
> # (dialup connection online?)
> if [ -f /var/run/ppp0.pid ]; then
> 	wget -q -O - www.teltarif.de/db/res-inet.html?zs=jetzt | \
> 	html2text -nobs | tee /tmp/teltarif-all.txt
> 
> 	cat /tmp/teltarif.txt | cut -d\  -f2- > /tmp/teltarif.cut
> 
> 	recode lat1..UTF-8 /tmp/tel*
> 
> 	clear
> 	head -n 100 /tmp/teltarif-all.txt | tail -n 36; echo
> 	ls -l /tmp/teltarif-all.txt
> 
> else
> 	echo
> 	echo "No dialup connection online"
> 	echo
> fi
> #############################################################################
> 
> 
> 
> Good Lucks, Germans!
> 
> (or you pays your bucks, Hermann)
> 
> 

What a hassle!
I've also had very little luck finding a reasonable provider here 
in Tennessee. They all cut you off after four hours max, 
sometimes every ten minutes at peak use times.
First I tried earthlink, but they cut you off every single time you 
download more than ~1.5MB. Then copper, but they informed me there 
is a 300 hour maximum use per month (on "unlimited" accounts).

Currently I'm using earth-comm, at least I can download things and 
no usage limits, plus it's dirt cheap. But having to reconnect frequently 
is a drag. Some days I get the "full four hours" before they cut me off, 
some days they do it every 10-15 minutes. The TOS warn that if you use 
a script to avoid the cutoff your service will be terminated.

It's the only real drawback to living here.

-- 
❤ ♫ ❤ ♫ ❤ ♫ ❤   
 Indulekha