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Re: Modem-Sharing



Hello Schlomo,

> WARNING: Don't play around with hdparm and old harddisks / controllers !

You shouldn't be so negative - just test hdparm on a readonly filesystem
and everything should be fine (i.e. the HD hangs, you have to reboot but
suffer no data loss). Of course I'd backup really important stuff before
any tests on HD device level.

Quoting from the man page:
       be used with caution at first, preferably on  a  read-only
       filesystem.   Most  drives  work well with these features,
       but a few drive/controller combinations are not 100%  com-
       patible.  Filesystem corruption may result.  Backup every-
       thing before experimenting!

> 1. I crashed my system twice last week with " hdparm -c 1 -a 8 -m 16
> /dev/hda ". They are all options that hdparm -i claims to be valid.

First, hdparm -i doesn't claim any options to be valid. It only reads what
the drive reports to the inquiry command (at system startup).
Then -c 1 is not supposed to work with all chipsets (in the manpage). Did
you try "-c 3" first ?
Don't blame hdparm for behavior that is well in the specs ;-)

> HIPP + 486-boad with onboard VLB ide controller. On my other computer
> Pentium, 430VX, IBM 4.3 GB disk, there was no problem applying those
> settings (and dma, of course). Comments are welcome.

On 16 bit controllers it can be fatal to use the -c 1/3 option. All 16 bit
controllers I have cannot access the drive after that.
One of my 32 bit VLB controllers does not support the -c 1 option, you have
to use -c 3.
Another one has hardware problems: after power on it is an enhanced ide 32
bit controller, after reset it supports only ide 16 bit.
I'd suggest you should 1) use -c 3 2) look wether your controller chipset
causes problems in 32 bit mode under os2/win as well.

>   2. There are a couple of applications I can't do any more with the modem
> in the linux box and out of my Pentium:
> * Play a modem-modem game with my pal's (most games don't support IP and if
> they do, I doubt that it works over masquerading)

You could connect the Win95 box to the Linux box using null modem cable and
write a small program on the linux box that opens two serial ports
(at the correct speed) and copy all data between them (as you said
below).

> Now, if I could find a prog to send faxes from Win95 over the linux-box in a
> CONVIENIENT way (like the windows-fax-program emulates a printer) I could
> live with a null-modem cable or wven stop playing modem-modem games :-(

Since I always have an xterm to my linux server when I run win95 in the net
I save the fax as TIFF file to a samba disk and send it from the linux prompt
(the file is already on the server disk, using samba).
It should be easy to integrate the "send a file with name xxx as fax"
functionality in a html page on the linux server if you find it easier to
use your browser than the command line.

Sure this is no perfect solution - someone should write a printer driver
for win95 that uses the lpr protocol _and_ asks for a phone number - but
I find it easier than sending the fax via mail to a mail->fax gateway
(since most of my faxes contain graphics).

Sincerely,
	Simon Bock
--
        "I am Bill Gates of Borg. You will be assimilated. If you are
         already assimilated, update to Assimilation95 for only $149."