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(ASCEND) Negotiate fixes etc

>

 I had assumed most of you were aware of this; I guess I should have spoken
up sooner.Anyway, where this comes from is the user. Some machines come with
"everything" on it,including AOL and a few other things that dick with the
TCP/IP stuff, even including a
different winsock. Other machines come with dialup networking installed, but
not tcp/ip.
MOST come without DUN installed, and on our Netscape installation sets we
send
out, Netscape will ask you to "Please insert the Win95 CD" when it needs to
load DUN.

This is where it gets cute: If the user SKIPS that (and many do, 'cause they
bootlegged the
Win95 or can't "find" it), well, Win95 will SAY that it's loaded, and on top
of that refuse
to load it even when you "find" the CD later, and delete the stuff in the
"Network" section
of the control panel. You can remove Dialup Adapter all day long, reboot,
add it back and
it will continue to use the missing one and never load the correct one from
the CD. Not all
builds of 95 do this, but the vast majority in our user base do.

So the only thing to do is go to Add/remove programs, blow the comm package
completely,
reboot, let it build a driver database, add the comm package (hyperterm and
DUN), and
then add TCP/IP. This ALWAYS fixes the dreaded "Can't negotiate a compatible
set
of network protocols" error, unless it's a WINmodem. Don't get me started on
those things.

The earlier message about blowing the inf/bin file is something we're gonna
try right now on
the next one- if I understand properly, it should save having to blow the
comm package and
just force a re-read of the DUN from CD. That'll save quite a bit of time,
and as most of
our tech support is long-distance, I owe somebody a beer for that one if it
works.

Other stuff- my opinion, based on what we've seen: Most of the compression
on/off and
VJ on/off confusion is a holdover from the days when most users were Win3.1
and
for some reason we've never been able to get software compression to turn on
with Win3.1
and the Shiva stack. SO....it's slow logging in, since the connections argue
about the
compression for a while. If you turn off compression on the MAX, it goes
right in. Win95
doesn't seem to care a lot, but it is slower if the compressions aren't
matched, on or off on
both ends.

These are our observations about performance: When Win3.1 connects, it runs
the same
whether compression is on or not, which tells me that it didn't ever really
work no matter
how it was set. Win95, with "enable software compression" and "use ip header
comp"
enabled gives a touch better throughput on streaming pre-compressed FTP
files, which is
what we use to test. You always get linespeed or better ftp rates with this
setup. If
compression  is off at either end, it drops by .1 or .2 at least, sometimes
more.

Of course, this is using "STAC". MS-STAC (when we played with it) worked
even better
for Win95, but queered DNS on ALL Win3.1 connections. Never ever could get
it to work
at all- again leading me to believe that software compression on the Win3.1
stack has never
really worked.

Anyway, this is how we do it, and our stuff simply screams. We're so much
faster than
everyone around us that the competition thinks we're enchanted; in fact, our
setup is simply
the fastest ISP I've ever seen.  Not to mention being out here in the
boonies and still don't
have PRI everywhere, but I'm not complaining since our CT1s run almost as
fast as our PRI
lines, and faster than everyone else's PRIs... ;-)

If I could find the damned 2 minute timeout thing on the latest MAX my life
would be
smooth.

'Shot


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