On Wed, 30 Oct 1996, Mark Brinicombe wrote:

> Hi,
>   Ok someone needs to look into this. I have not got round to setting up
> another machine as a PPP server for testing purposed. Have a word with Scott
> <s.k.stevens@ic.ac.uk> as he had a brief look at PPP at one point I think.
> 

Hi,
 I have been holding off with this posting until I had a chance to gather 
a bit more information, but I feel now might be an appropriate time to 
give my piece.
 I have a DX33 running linux which is networked to my RiscPC. Due to a 
few problems with my I-Cubed network card, I had the need to use a null 
modem cable to setup a permanent (ie. not dial-up) connection using ppp.
 Small side point: I have successfully had pppd running under RiscBSD 
using it to connect to various dial-up servers. It suffered from frequent 
'freezes' with messages such as:

Oct 31 21:37:17 medusa /netbsd: com0: 0 silo overflows, 22 ibuf overflows

When I tried a connection from the linux machine with similar options, I 
got significantly faster transfer rates.

 Anyway, when I first estblished the serial link, I was using a speed of 
19200. When I tried increasing this speed so as to speed up transfer 
rates, it resulted in a kernel crash under RiscBSD. Any subsequent 
network activity from the linux machine results in it's kernel crashing 
as well. Like I said, I was planning to try a few more tests to give you 
more information - if anyone want me to try anything specific, I'll 
happily give it a try.

One thing to note though is that if I left the linux machine alone, 
rebooted the RiscPC and brought up the ppp connection from RiscBSD again, 
the link appeared as if it hadn't been broken from the linux end and I 
could safely bring the link down without crashing either machine.

For your reference, I am still using kernel #4339 and haven't upgraded to 
the 1.2 binaries yet due to the reported problems with I-Cubed cards. I 
was planning to  lay my hands on a CD-Rom of the 1.2 Release at the AW96 
show this weekend (obviously I am going to have to wait a little longer 
now!) 

Hope this info is useful to someone. If I can be of any help to track ppp 
problems do let me know.....

Regards, 
Rob.