Ok, here it is, finally. If you use a cell phone provider that uses GSM and GPRS (which, in Reno, would be AT&T Wireless (my own), Cingular, or T-Mobile), the following should work to link your phone and laptop/PDA to the network. If you don't know already, the speeds are on the order of dial- up--I measure my own speeds at around 5-5.5kBps, or 45 kbps average. However, this depends on network congestion and the particular device (GPRS class).
Basically, what we're doing is establishing a PPP connection with the phone. This distinction is important, as the phone is really acting as a protocol translator, so you're not getting charged for data no matter how long the connection stays up or how many times your phone and laptop exchange PPP pings (though you still will get charged for ICMP pings, since that's forwarded through to the network). The key is to dial "*99#" or "#98" from your chat script: this tells the phone to initiate a GPRS connection to the network. Now beyond this, it may be dependent on your provider: in AT&T Wireless' case, there's no username or password needed. My phone at least (a Siemens S46) will try to engage in CHAP first, then PAP, then no authentication despite the fact there's nothing to authenticate against--I can't seem to turn this off, unfortunately, so the clients have to negotiate this through. However, if you look at the negotiation sessions, you can cut some negotiation down by disabling certain things in your PPP client, since you're always connecting to the same device: in my case, the phone doens't like any kind of advanced compression (even van-jacobson) so I just disabled that negotiation and gained around 1/2-1 second. Another thing, at least on AWS, is that you're assigned a dynamic IP as well as 2 DNS's by the network, so turn on the "usepeerdns" option and make the appropriate scripts to move /etc/ppp/resolv.conf to /etc/resolv.conf and back or make it play nice with your local caching DNS. Good Luck!! Mike __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ RLUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
