> Perhaps you could summarize exactly what your setup 
> is... what version of NetBSD, what sort of system, how
> is it connected to the Internet? You mention a 56K 
> modem in this message, but ethernet in another message;
> does the system in question have both a modem and 
> ethernet? Are you connecting to the Internet through
> the modem that's directly attached, or through another 
> machine that's doing some sort of Internet connection
> sharing? What error does KMail give you? The same error 
> that you've been reporting before from your ThinkPad 
> about "a SMTP error occured."

Dave,

The FTP and Ethernet are a wholly separate issue from 
KMail and the modems. It has been explained to me about 
FTP and half/full duplex on the Ethernet.

I'm not trying (yet) to share a modem via the Ethernet. I 
have gotten nowhere near that far with my network yet. I 
was only using FTP to move tarballs over from the tower 
to the laptop so as to install KDE. That's figured out, I 
think, more later. 

The SMTP error is wholly different, and occurs whether I 
have a cable in the LAN or not. It happened before on the 
ThinkPad, in KDE 1.1.2 on NetBSD 1.5, prior to the last 
clean re-install of both, and an upgrade of both after 
that.

Piecing together all the data was one of the things I was 
trying to do for proper submission of my query to this 
list. But with all the files and data spliced in, the 
email is over 2K in length. I had gone to a lot of 
trouble to gather and format all the factors into that 
file so that folks could see and would not have to guess.

But I could not email the file. Not from NetBSD anyway. 
Which is but one example of what I mean when I complain 
that NetBSD seems to thwart me at every turn.

So now, for some reason I can't seem to send any email at 
all that is over 2K in length. Not even from the laptop 
by itself divorced from the net. Nor from the tower by 
itself divorced from the net. Not only that, but once I 
try to send such a long file, KMail won't ever after 
allow any other shorter files after...not until I delete 
the long file from the que. I'd worked hard on that file. 
I did not want to delete it. 

So I couldn't send the file from KMail. And I couldn't 
cut and paste the laboriously gathered file into 
Communicator. What a drag to have to copy that file to a 
floppy and carry it over to my smirking Win98 box.

Finally, I spent some hours sending randomly configured 
emails to myself on another account. In due course I 
settled in to a purely iterative technique: sending rows 
of 50 X's, like this...

 XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX

...and discovered that I can send only 2K worth of them. 
But each iteration of this trial and error process 
consumed two minutes of impatient waiting because the 
"transmitting" box stayed up that long. And if I dared to 
try something productive in the meantime -- X would 
sometimes lock up, with dead pieces of KDE windows 
littered about on my desktop.

Enough iterations proved that less than 2K of any 
grouping of chars goes thru. More than 2K hangs it up. 
Over the modem, not going over the Ethernet. 

So...it is going straight out the modem. And no, it ain't 
a Winmodem. On the laptop it is a Linksys modem, the same 
one that Peter Seebach (who sold me the ThinkPad) used 
with success so long before. On the tower it is a 
USRobotics external modem on tty00. Does this not seem to 
imply that it isn't a network problem?

2K seems to be the limit, for any char grouping, in an 
email sent from KDE. 

It seems to be that the only thing I use NetBSD for is to 
diagnose how things fail in NetBSD. I have spent umpteen 
hours and no small sums without ever accomplishing a lick 
of real work with NetBSD. Each success has been but a 
doorway to the next failure or enigma. Who would not be 
frustrated?

Regards,

Gan Starling
Kalamazoo MI USA

PS -- Emailed via Win98

--
Mysterious Starling -- Rarest Extinct Bird
     _         
   <(+)__        Gan Uesli Starling 
     ((__/)=-    Kalamazoo, MI, USA
      `||`      
       ++        http://starling.ws 

Newbie-2-Newbie NetBSD Unix How-To Pages at... 
http://om-ah-hum.com/share/gus_netbsd_index.html