Hello Binkley!

Looking forward to learning more about how it works, so far I have about 4 connects out of about 30 calls... think X00 doesn't like my smartdrv or something so I switched to BNU.

I'm only up for modem midnight to 8AM EDT because I heard there are less sunspots at night.

Thanks,
Brian

... "Who would have guessed reading and writing would pay off?!?!" -- Homer --- FMailX32 1.60
* Origin: Rhymes With Wrinkly (1:116/903)

Hello Brian,

On Wed 2039-Mar-23 03:59, Brian Wood (1:116/903) wrote to Binkley:

Looking forward to learning more about how it works, so far I have
about 4 connects out of about 30 calls... think X00 doesn't like my smartdrv or something so I switched to BNU.

I've always had better luck with bnu as well, but as they
say ymmv.
tHe binkley docs are fairly good, make sure you've got them. THe reference document bt-ref.txt is pretty ocmprehensive,
and bt-user.txt gives some good basics and examples.

I don't know about smartdrv and fossils, but I found out it
did some strange things with mail bundles, so disabled it
here.

WAs just snooping through the nodelist and saw your entry
the other night, welcome to Fidonet.

I'm only up for modem midnight to 8AM EDT because I heard there
are less sunspots at night.

<rotfl> YOu can't be serious are you?

... "Who would have guessed reading and writing would pay off?!?!"
-- Homer --- FMailX32 1.60
- Origin: Rhymes With Wrinkly (1:116/903)

Regards,
Richard
--- timEd 1.10.y2k+
* Origin: (1:116/901)

ymmv. tHe binkley docs are fairly good, make sure you've
got them. THe reference document bt-ref.txt is pretty
ocmprehensive, and bt-user.txt gives some good basics and

Well, I had v2.60 but I upgraded because Danny is runnning the XE version and the docs are kind of scattered but I think I got it set up pretty fair. It dials and does events like it should. I never used binkley before I was a punk on FD it was pretty easy setup, but it looks like they crippled FrontDoor pretty bad in the later versions.

found out it did some strange things with mail bundles, so
disabled it here. WAs just snooping through the nodelist and

Man it's an old 160meg WD it has to have some kind of cache, I tried norton and might try the old hyperdisk I found it online. I'm using DV too so it's all buggered up.

I'm only up for modem midnight to 8AM EDT because I
heard there are less sunspots at night.

<rotfl> YOu can't be serious are you?

Did you not hear about the alignment of Elenin or Nibiru or whatever the dark star thing and all the solar flares and the supermoon? Well it's pretty complicaed but I think the mailer is working anyway.

Thanks!
Brian

... AD&D Famous Last Words: "You saw a WHAT around the corner?"
--- FMailX32 1.60
* Origin: Rhymes With Wrinkly (1:116/903)

Well ..

WAs just snooping through the nodelist and saw your entry
the other night, welcome to Fidonet.

I'm only up for modem midnight to 8AM EDT because I heard there BW> are

less sunspots at night.

<rotfl> YOu can't be serious are you?

He might be more informed than a LOT of people don't realize! But just may not
understand the 24 hour reality of this.. Scowl .. Many, many people don't understand the very real risk all us humans on the earth of modern day communications technology face from possible very real Solar Flare increasing intensity in the next two years. You see we are now actually going up toward the maximum of the sunspots in Cycle 24 now which has sort of recently started.

The sunspot cycles are generally in 11-13 year range, none to maximum. They are
very definitely know to be this or the next cycle because of the magnetic reversal in their polarity on the sun between this and an adjacent cycle. As well, they generally go from the end of the old cycle to the max of the next one in about two years, then the spots more slowly decay down to nothing again until the next reverse in polarity for the next cycle. However, the time from the end of Cycle 23 until this very definite start of Cycle 24 was quite a bit longer than usual. And there are rare times when we may go a decade or more with NO spots called a Maunder Minimum, which we all were originally suspicious
might be happening now. But no, up we are going.

And as the sunspots ramp up, so do Solar Flares! Plus in this cycle they are really romping up as strong outbursts. Well, what can they really do? As X level flares they could destroy almost ALL wire and metal connected connectivity in the whole world as we know it! The strongest one we have ever had in a couple hundred years was what is known as the Carrington Event back in
1859 two years after the Golden Spike was driven on the railroad coast to coast
completion here in the USA. It was so strong that it burned up all the telegraph sounders in the USA, hurting many operators as the electric shock hit
them, plus in a number of places, where the railroad rails got pumped up by the
more than 30,000,000 electron volts per meter blast and the arced from the rails to the earth over the wood cross ties, they actully set fire to the cross
ties! We've only had five or six really huge X-level flares this way since then. I think one in 1985 and one in 2003. Plus depending on which way the Earth is facing when the burst hits, the damage can be very geographically specific, or in the case of a massive long term burst .. whole world wide.

If we get an X-4 or stronger flare, it will take out virtually *ALL* of the entire power grids where that hits, all copper wired phone and data communication, all unprotected wire connected computer systems, virtully all of
the now computer enabled cars, same with the airplanes, arc and burn up the power distribution transformer substations, circuit breakers; you name it. The
only humans that would die from the direct electric wave would be those with pacemakers. The wired would shock and burn up their hearts from the flash.

Now .. in the last four months as Cycle 24 ramps up we have had I think FOUR possible X-level flares! A one in five shot at each per my memory as I write this. In fact in I think the 2003 shot a number of the power grids in Canada were down for a day or more. Plus in the second run back here in this romp, my
memory is that China actually lost some of their IP connectivity and so on.

Plus, what else is happening to us now on Earth? As we go forward in the next two years or so, we are also going to go through the magnetic center of the whole Galaxy here on Earth and so on! So what is the effect going to be for us
relative to Sun and even Earth Magna shift,plust polar shift and so on as we are DEFINITELY seeing evidence of more than usual disturbances now? And would you add two years to the peaking of this spot stuff to 2010 and you get 2012, right?

We live in VERY interesting times, per the Chinese Proverbs. We all here may well see or not get to see for whatever cause we lose that see ability, the reall outcome of all this.

And keeping your modem off line except at night might curiously be a way to help stop this. But I suspect that is only a tiny start of protection worry. Your power lines, your computer switching power supplies, you UPS design, your totally need for Faraday Shielding of your whole data center and hard drive archives and so on are FAR more to worry about than your modem connections.

Just a litlle learning here from a Narte Master Telecommunications Engineer certified since 1985 at all this and really familiar with lightning strike protection and all that stuff

Sleep well; OS/2's still awake! ;)

Mike @ 1:117/3001

--- Maximus/2 3.01
* Origin: Ziplog Public Port (1:117/3001)

HI Brian,

On Wed 2039-Mar-23 16:48, Brian Wood (1:116/903) wrote to Richard Webb:

ymmv. The binkley docs are fairly good, make sure you've
got them. THe reference document bt-ref.txt is pretty
comprehensive, and bt-user.txt gives some good basics and

Well, I had v2.60 but I upgraded because Danny is runnning the XE
version and the docs are kind of scattered but I think I got it set
up pretty fair. It dials and does events like it should. I never
used binkley before I was a punk on FD it was pretty easy setup, but
it looks like they crippled FrontDoor pretty bad in the later
versions.

ONly set up fd to help another guy get going with fido back
in the day, and used it myself from my point to test before
I helped him get it going.
still some fd users could tell you quite a bit about later
versions. My uplink is fd conversant.

found out it did some strange things with mail bundles, so
disabled it here. WAs just snooping through the nodelist and

Man it's an old 160meg WD it has to have some kind of cache, I tried
norton and might try the old hyperdisk I found it online. I'm using
DV too so it's all buggered up.

YEah this is a 133 mhz and even with that might benefit from some caching, but I've just learned to put up with it
without it.

I'm only up for modem midnight to 8AM EDT because I
heard there are less sunspots at night.

<rotfl> YOu can't be serious are you?

Did you not hear about the alignment of Elenin or Nibiru or whatever
the dark star thing and all the solar flares and the supermoon?
Well it's pretty complicaed but I think the mailer is working
anyway.

I'm more inclined to think of sunspots aas friendly, being a radio op, but big ones can do stuff like an emp that aren't
nice, but that's another thread entirely <grin>.



Regards,
Richard
--- timEd 1.10.y2k+
* Origin: (1:116/901)

HI MIke,

On Wed 2039-Mar-23 13:52, Mike Luther (1:117/3001) wrote to Richard Webb:

<snip>

I'm only up for modem midnight to 8AM EDT because I heard there BW> are

less sunspots at night.

<rotfl> YOu can't be serious are you?

He might be more informed than a LOT of people don't realize! But
just may not understand the 24 hour reality of this.. Scowl ..

<snip good points>


INdeed, I've been somewhat gratified to see some sunspots,
but I recall the 2003 event you spoke of.


DId you ever have a look at that document I crashed to your
system some months ago. Latest draft has been hatched into
hamnews file echo on ham-fdn.



Regards,
Richard
--- timEd 1.10.y2k+
* Origin: (1:116/901)

I helped him get it going. still some fd users could tell
you quite a bit about later versions. My uplink is fd
conversant.

Nah, I'm stuck on Binkley now it's great. I'm sure there's some more tweakin I can do, that's half the fun of it. There are some cfg options I'm not sure about, but the issues I'm dealing with are memory troubles probably. I have noticed when the recent activity gets full I get memory overflow.

YEah this is a 133 mhz and even with that might benefit from
some caching, but I've just learned to put up with it

You know that's a good thought, I might try reducing the size way down or doing without awhile and see how it goes.
Thanks,
Brian

... Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable.
--- FMailX32 1.60
* Origin: Rhymes With Wrinkly (1:116/903)

Hi Brian,

On Thu 2039-Mar-24 07:36, Brian Wood (1:116/903) wrote to Richard Webb:

<snip>

Nah, I'm stuck on Binkley now it's great. I'm sure there's some
more tweakin I can do, that's half the fun of it. There are some
cfg options I'm not sure about, but the issues I'm dealing with are
memory troubles probably. I have noticed when the recent activity
gets full I get memory overflow.

YEp, reduce the size of that buffer, there's a config
parameter for it, was just reading about it yesterday. Are
you loading your fossil driver into high or extended memory?

YEah this is a 133 mhz and even with that might benefit from
some caching, but I've just learned to put up with it

You know that's a good thought, I might try reducing the size way
down or doing without awhile and see how it goes.

disk intensive stuff with a lot of "seeks" from the same
file seem to take a little longer without caching, but it's
livable.

Check out bt-ref.txt and you'll find that config verb which
allows you to define the size of that recent activity window buffer. I was looking at something else and ran across it
again yesterday.


Regards,
Richard
--- timEd 1.10.y2k+
* Origin: (1:116/901)

Hi Brian,

following up a message from Richard Webb to Brian Wood:

cfg options I'm not sure about, but the issues I'm dealing with are
memory troubles probably. I have noticed when the recent activity
gets full I get memory overflow.

FOund it in the file cfgguide.txt which you should have with the docs.
tO save you some hassle though:

from cfgguide.txt:

;;; RecentActivityLines <number>

DOn't know what the default is, but if you've that parameter too large you could conceivably run into memory problems.
There's more discussion of this in bt-ref.txt iirc.

Regards,
Richard
--- timEd 1.10.y2k+
* Origin: (1:116/901)

is, but if you've that parameter too large you could
conceivably run into memory problems. There's more
discussion of this in bt-ref.txt iirc. Regards, Richard ---

I'll try messing with that, it is set at 300 lines I think the file where this info is stored is binkley.a01 24kb

I can't remember why I set it to 300

Thanks,
Brian

... All those updates, and still imperfect!!
--- FMailX32 1.60
* Origin: Rhymes With Wrinkly (1:116/903)

you loading your fossil driver into high or extended memory?

I'm loading bnu in the batch file right now like this
c:\fido\bnu.com /L:1=11520 /F+
it doesn't load high, at least that is what QEMM says, but it's hard to know because of the strange way it moves stuff around. I tried X00 in config.sys and in the batch file, and tried messing with it for a couple of weeks and couldn't get anything near reliable connects. Using local dialup internet numbers to test outbound calls, bnu connects everytime at 31200 or 33600.

thanks again for any help,
brian

... All of life's answers are on the wrong side of progress.
--- FMailX32 1.60
* Origin: Rhymes With Wrinkly (1:116/903)

Just a litlle learning
here from a Narte Master Telecommunications Engineer
certified since 1985 at all this and really familiar with
lightning strike protection and all that stuff

Mike that was a killer post thanks! Kind of stuff you can't find just aywhere, what's a faraday, like tinfoil hat?

... "Please do not offer my god a peanut!" -- Apu
--- FMailX32 1.60
* Origin: Rhymes With Wrinkly (1:116/903)

Hello, Brian.

Thursday March 24 2011 at 17:51, you wrote to Richard Webb:

it doesn't load high, at least that is what QEMM says, but it's hard
to know because of the strange way it moves stuff around. I tried X00
in config.sys and in the batch file, and tried messing with it for a couple of weeks and couldn't get anything near reliable connects.
Using local dialup internet numbers to test outbound calls, bnu
connects everytime at 31200 or 33600.

What was the command line you're using for X00?

Disclaimer: I've used OS/2 for the past 15 years, so my advice may or may not help, but I thought I'd give it a shot anyway. :)

Later,
Sean

... Murphy was an optimist.
--- GoldED/2 3.0.1
* Origin: Paragon BBS - 423.434.0851 - paragon.darktech.org (1:18/200)

Hello, Brian.

Thursday March 24 2011 at 17:53, you wrote to Mike Luther:

Mike that was a killer post thanks! Kind of stuff you can't find just aywhere, what's a faraday, like tinfoil hat?

A Faraday cage (named after Michael Faraday) is a fine metal mesh cage put around an electronic object to protect it from outside electomagnetic interference. It's commonly used in high-end bomb shelters and the like to protect from EMP.

Later,
Sean

... WinErr 01C: Uncertainty error - Uncertainty may be inadequate.
--- GoldED/2 3.0.1
* Origin: Paragon BBS - 423.434.0851 - paragon.darktech.org (1:18/200)

Hi Brian,

On Thu 2039-Mar-24 17:45, Brian Wood (1:116/903) wrote to Richard Webb:

is, but if you've that parameter too large you could
conceivably run into memory problems. There's more
discussion of this in bt-ref.txt iirc. Regards, Richard ---

I'll try messing with that, it is set at 300 lines I think the file
where this info is stored is binkley.a01 24kb

YEp, whatever you use as binkley.cfg, which is default name
of your config file.

That's a pretty large value you mentioned. Unless you're
really passing a lot of traffic with multiple systems that
would be a few days' worth.
Better to just keep your log and browse the log.

SOme good binkley log analysis tools are available. Look
for
bkla202.zip somewhere. I use it to post a daily analysis of system activity as
a message.

There are some other tricks you can do with the dos find
command to do some analysis of your log files at periodic
intervals. This works for me, and I use loglevel 5.


Regards,
Richard
--- timEd 1.10.y2k+
* Origin: (1:116/901)

HI Brian,

On Thu 2039-Mar-24 17:53, Brian Wood (1:116/903) wrote to Mike Luther:

just aywhere, what's a faraday, like tinfoil hat?

NOpe, a Faraday cage, or Faraday as he called it is an rf
proof environment. USually made entirely of metal. Iirc
this metal cage is earthed as well, but might be wrong about that, I'm on pain meds.

Regards,
Richard
--- timEd 1.10.y2k+
* Origin: (1:116/901)

What was the command line you're using for X00? Disclaimer:

I have tried variations of these lines, several modems from 14400 to 33.6 in and out of DV, different memory managers, clean boot, etc.

Noticed my modem negotiation has a different chirp or two with BNU

c:\fido\x00.exe 1=COM2,IRQ3 E B,1,38400
rem com:2 ------^
c:\fido\x00.exe 1=COM2,IRQ3 E B,1,115200 T=1024 R=1024 DV

I've used OS/2 for the past 15 years, so my advice may or
may not help, but I thought I'd give it a shot anyway. :)

Well, does os/2 use sio and can I get it for dos?
Thanks,
brian

... "ME or THAT computer" she said... That was yesterday...
--- FMailX32 1.60
* Origin: Rhymes With Wrinkly (1:116/903)

A Faraday cage (named after Michael Faraday) is a fine metal
mesh cage put around an electronic object to protect it from
outside electomagnetic interference.

I will look it up on dukgo.com ty, bw

... A cat's worst enemy is a closed door.
--- FMailX32 1.60
* Origin: Rhymes With Wrinkly (1:116/903)

Hello, Brian.

Friday March 25 2011 at 08:26, you wrote to me:

Noticed my modem negotiation has a different chirp or two with BNU

Both of those command lines look right..

Well, does os/2 use sio and can I get it for dos?

Yes, SIO/VMODEM were written specifically for OS/2, so you have to run OS/2 to use SIO/VMODEM but I'll say that I've never had a lick of problems with the package since 1997 or so when I first started using it.

Later,
Sean

... Some people will see the light only when they feel the heat.
--- GoldED/2 3.0.1
* Origin: Paragon BBS - 423.434.0851 - paragon.darktech.org (1:18/200)

Both of those command lines look right..

Well, does os/2 use sio and can I get it for dos?

Yes, SIO/VMODEM were written specifically for OS/2, so you
have to run OS/2 to use SIO/VMODEM

I might have a hack version x00, I was using a file called x00150.zip I seem to recall that Ray Gwinn got ripped off or something, or there were some particular beta versions that would hang up on other x00 fossils? Dude was a pretty smart cookie, I wouldn't be surprised if SIO had something similar in it.
L8r,
bw

... And that is how we know the Earth is banana-shaped.
--- FMailX32 1.60
* Origin: Rhymes With Wrinkly (1:116/903)

Hello, Brian.

Monday March 28 2011 at 11:50, you wrote to me:

fossils? Dude was a pretty smart cookie, I wouldn't be surprised if
SIO had something similar in it. L8r, bw

Yes, if it's a "hot" serial number, SIO will deliberately mess with the connection, such as slowing it down or dropping characters. If you attempt to use a "hot" key with VMODEM (SIO/VMODEM use the same key), it will not connect to another system using VMODEM with the same key.

I'd heard a few years back that Ray Gwinn was thinking about making SIO open source, but never heard anything back about that.

Later,
Sean

... Opportunity always knocks at the least opportune moment.
--- GoldED/2 3.0.1
* Origin: Paragon BBS - 423.434.0851 - paragon.darktech.org (1:18/200)

Yes, if it's a "hot" serial number, SIO will deliberately
mess with the connection, such as slowing it down or
dropping characters. If you attempt to use a "hot" key

Makes sense to me, can't say I would not have done the same. So all the OS/2 systems are using SIO, is there a fossil known to be the bestest most compatible for connecting with DOS? I downloaded one called ADF that was made public around 1999 supposedly, but I haven't tried it. Looksa little tricky. I really want to put some effort into getting the modems working.
thanks,
bw

... #4: Do *not* go into a new echo and ask "What do ya all do here?"
--- FMailX32 1.60
* Origin: Rhymes With Wrinkly (1:116/903)

Hello, Brian.

Monday March 28 2011 at 21:15, you wrote to me:

bestest most compatible for connecting with DOS? I downloaded one
called ADF that was made public around 1999 supposedly, but I haven't tried it. Looksa little tricky. I really want to put some effort
into getting the modems working. thanks, bw

If it's v1.50, it works fine. However, I believe it's specifically designed for use under Windows, but I could be wrong. ADF is not hard to configure if you simply read the directions and look at the sample ADFCOM1.BAT and ADFCOM2.BAT batch files.

However, getting telnet working under DOS is a pretty good trick in and of itself and one that I've never quite got'ta work right.

We're really kinda off-topic in here now, so netmail might be best.

Later,
Sean

... Murphy's Seventh Corollary: every solution breeds new problems.
--- GoldED/2 3.0.1
* Origin: Paragon BBS - 423.434.0851 - paragon.darktech.org (1:18/200)