On nights with bad connection, i usually would find some message like
"speed 13 not supported" ( 13 is what i give for bsdcomp and deflate ) in
my messages file.
i usually took the abscence of such messages to be a confirmation that
vsnl does indeed do compression *on some days*. This was a weak premise so
wanted to explore this further on my rh 6.2.
fired up my connection with debug option to ppp, and pored over the
messages in /var/log/messages. In order to understand these, up goes vim
on ../src/drivers/net/ppp.c. But to my surprise only few of the strings
where there. After some copious expenditure of thought it dawned on my
moronic mind that, the messages were not coming from kernel space but user
space.
I did not have the code for pppd, and quality of the connection was
enough to deter me from downloading it. So
strings /usr/sbin/pppd | more
It was a relief to find that the messages like " speed %d not supported"
were indeed there. I was still not convinced that vsnl was not doing
compression. I wanted more proof.
Then i realised all the messages in the log where standard ppp logs. No
debug info were there.
I was thus forced to lookup the pristine syslog.conf and understand the
syntax for the 1st time. Inorder to force userspace debug logs, i added an
entry for
daemon.debug /var/log/messages.
Reconnect ppp, but still no debug messages. Eventually, after several
unsuccesful tries, i thought of
kill -HUP <pid of syslogd> Debug info atlast.
Now all the lcp ( link control protocol ), ipcp (ip..), ccp ( compression
...) were getting logged. This finally showed that vsnl's ppp server does
not even respond to the ccp packets. In other words no compression for ppp
data. It however requested for vj compression, to which my poor pc agreed.
so finally it looks like vsnl indeed does not do ppp compression ( vj only
compresses control packets and ip headers iirc ). But i faintly remember
seeing some messages saying "..compresion 13 accepted". So for a couple of
days i am going to keep a sharp eye on my log messages.
-- sreangsu
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