The internet in Belarus

[Shawn T. Rutledge]

Well I'm back... got in Monday evening.

I took the Thinkpad 760C with me and tried to get an Internet connection
set up for my friend.  It turns out they are using SLIP rather than PPP
and I had no experience with that; but fortunately I had installed diald,
and it has SLIP support.  What I didn't figure out was how to get it to
handle dynamic IP assignment.  The SLIP protocol doesn't do this; but the
BelPak server, after prompting for login/password etc., would send a string
something like "your IP address is xx.xx.xx.xx" before going into SLIP
mode; and diald can supposedly parse such a string if you use the 
"dynamic" feature.  But since it was working, and worked repeatedly,
I thought maybe it was going to be a fixed IP after all.  Nope... the
day after I left it quit working.  Now another friend of my friend (who
is apparently also a Debian fan) is going to try to figure it out this 
Saturday.  

It also bothered me that I had to guess the "remote" address... as I
understand, the "local" address is the address assigned to the client
machine and the "remote" address is like a gateway, right? so that there
is a default gateway route to that address?  well anyway it's not specified
in that string which comes back from the SLIP server, nor was it specified
in any of the documentation from the ISP, so I hope I guessed right, and
it doesn't ever change.

When it was working the output of ifconfig looked like this:

sl1       Link encap:Serial Line IP  
          inet addr:194.158.192.242  P-t-P:193.232.248.1  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:2477 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:2520 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:10 
	
And it was incredibly slow.  Waited 10 minutes or so for the slashdot
home page (with netscape reporting speeds around 100 bytes/sec), and it 
never did completely load before I gave up.  I needed to ftp a few Debian 
packages, so used wget in infinite-retry mode and went to bed and let it 
have a few hours to do it.  apt-get was quite useless because the 
connections kept timing out and it won't retry automatically.

BTW I'm building a web page about the trip at

http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud/journal/belarus/

but it's not all done yet... maybe in a few more days.

-- 
  _______                   Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD  ecloud@bigfoot.com
 (_  | |_)          http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud  kb7pwd@kb7pwd.ampr.org
 __) | | \________________________________________________________________