[plug] Modem problems

[Ryan]

Howdy PLUG,

It has been a loooong time since myself, linux and a 56K modem have been in the same room (yay DSL).  I'm helping a friend setup a gateway, chucked Debian on it, pppconfig - got on the net, jumped around a bit, then the following happens:

random times, but commonly 20ish minutes into the connection, all activity stops, and the send/receive lights very faintly and slowly blink (retraining?) then a bit more data comes down, then it stops again, stuffs around a bit, might do it a few more times, and then finally stops totally, with nothing blinking.  No traffic flows whatsoever.  The modem will eventually hang up after 4-5 minutes of this saying the serial connection is down as it failed to receive replies to 4 echo requests.  There is never a problem establishing a connection, just retaining one.  It is an iiNet dialup accont.

So .... tried 5 modems (Acer, Maestro, Spirit, Banksia, Netcomm), 4 other Debian boxes (486, P200, Cyrix 200+, Celeron), 3 different kernels (2.2.20-idepci, 2.4.18-bf, 2.4.21), 2 different phone lines, 4 different phone sockets.  All did exactly the same thing.  One of the boxes was my old gateway that had been in storage since I got DSL.  Therefore I know this box used to work perfectly with a modem ... but it still did the same thing.

Sounds like the phone line, or iiNet ... but every modem that we tried will connect flawlessly on a Windows machine with no init strings and stay connected for days.

Setting up dial-up gateways has always been simple for me until now ... can anyone suggest anything I might be missing?   I'm stumped.

Thanks,

Ryan