Back from a weekend at the family cottage. Barbecue in front of the lake, good weather, my brother’s birthday party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The family cottage is outside cell phone range. Normally, the cottage has wifi from a rural wireless provider, a satellite TV link, and a landline.
The rural data wireless was out. Using a us robotics usb 56K modem, I was able to make a 24Kbps connection, which is a low speed, even by dialup standards. This poor performance is due to the analog exchange and noise on a rural line: in the city one would expect 50Kbps. There are “light” versions of sites like gmail that load faster on slower connections, but even the simplest requests would often time out and require a reload.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was fortuitous that i had left a us robotics usb modem in the cottage 10 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was able make a dialup connection with my windows 10 laptop, but the experience was not as good as with previous versions: sharing the connection via mobile hotspot did not work, and using connection sharing via the wifi did not trigger a wizard with ad-hoc networking set up on the wifi adapter, things that worked well in prior versions of windows, as recently as windows 8.1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the community center 7KM away, near the d\u00e9panneur, there is free wifi and a picnic table. On my Linux laptop, I was able to apt install wvdial on the free wifi. wvdialconf autodetected the modem and the man page made it easy to create a dialup file \/etc\/wvdial.conf (even to find the option for pulse dialing: “ATDP”):<\/p>\n\n\n\n
[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Modem Type = USB Modem
Phone = xxxxxxxxxx
ISDN = 0
Password = xxxxxxxx
New PPPD = yes
Username = xxxxxxxx
Modem = \/dev\/ttyACM0
Baud = 33600
Dial command = ATDP<\/p>\n\n\n\n
wvdial was able to make a 24Kbps ppp connection. I gained some insights, and learned enough to complete a dialup wifi server, based on wvdial, hostapd and dnsmasq. Given the limited speed, there is little point in deploying a dialup server. I will, however, continue to maintain the ability to connect as a dialup workstation, from both my windows and linux laptops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Modern websites and i\/o make dialup almost useless. there may be edge cases especially involving security or remote telemetry, but for consumer use, I suggest driving to the free wifi at the community center.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back from a weekend at the family cottage. Barbecue in front of the lake, good weather, my brother’s birthday party. The family cottage is outside cell phone range. Normally, the cottage has wifi from a rural wireless provider, a satellite TV link, and a landline. The rural data wireless was out. Using a us robotics … <\/p>\n