[ILUG] probs with modem/ppp, please help!

[michael conry]

hi again,
i'll try to be quick not to waste everyone's time. All help needed and
appreciated (even if you can only tell me what the problem is not, i am
really at a dead end)

got an external modem... ELSA microlink external
dialling up to indigo free with wvdial (SuSE 6.3), and win 98.
dials up fine in windoze, and gives grand performance... no problems.
dials up fine in linux, far as i can see, and makes friends with indigo
computer. However, performance sucks massively. Download (ftp, http) is
quick for a very short time (about 16kbytes) and then slows down to
very slow (netscape keeps saying stuff is stalled). If i wait long
enough, things WILL load though. in ftp, 16 kb (approx, varies),
downloads v quick (few k a second), though overall download speed may
turn out to be 0.34.

I have trawled through ppp documentation, wvdial docs, ilug archives,
but still i do not know what is wrong or what to do (no changes to
/etc/ppp/options made any difference). below is some log and ifconfig...

This stuff turns up in /var/log/messages... I don't know what the
significance of  ****char-major-108***** is:
(can someone tell me?)

May 29 01:47:04 calm modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module
char-major-108
May 29 01:47:04 calm pppd[958]: pppd 2.3.10 started by root, uid 0
May 29 01:47:04 calm pppd[958]: Using interface ppp0
May 29 01:47:04 calm pppd[958]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/ttyS0
May 29 01:47:04 calm pppd[958]: sent [LCP ConfReq id=0x1 <asyncmap 0x0>
<pcomp> <accomp>]
May 29 01:47:13 calm last message repeated 3 times
May 29 01:47:13 calm pppd[958]: rcvd [LCP ConfAck id=0x1 <asyncmap 0x0>
<pcomp> <accomp>]
May 29 01:47:14 calm pppd[958]: rcvd [LCP ConfReq id=0x2b <asyncmap
0xa0000> <auth pap> <magic 0x5da701c8> <pcomp> <accomp>]

Afterwards, the connection is made, and the dns servers arranged, etc.,

ifconfig gives the following...
lots of frame errors! I don't know what this means...
When i turned on kdebug option in pppd options file, lots of
fcs errors (even when i turned off vj compression, which was
also being corrupted some way).

ppp0      Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol
          inet addr:194.125.177.126  P-t-P:194.125.145.176
Mask:255.255.255.255
          UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:346 errors:100 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:100
          TX packets:387 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:10

notes: if i am ftping to a site (e.g. ftp.heanet.ie), things like ls and
cd go fine (v. few of those frame errors), but a bigger transfer
generates loads and stalls (effectively).

I don't think it is a modem prob as such (i have tried both the wvdial
AT command lines, and the ones used by Win 98... neither gives any
specific errors i can see, but both give same problems described above).
Maybe ppp thinks the modem is doing something it isn't or something
(note, both windows and ppp are configged for hardware flow control, and
async map 0 is on).

Can anyone point me towards a solution???
(this has me driven mad... really)
(please cc me, i read digest)
thanks in advance
mick