DSL

Thursday evening a telemarketer from Frontier called wanting to sign me up for DSL.  I told him he better check his map again, it wasn't available n my area.  He said yes, it was, it had just been opened up.  So I signed up.
 

Well, Monday we got 'er done.  Everett unplugged the ethernet from the WB modem to the router and abandoned it.  Then we replaced the router I had with the new router from Frontier.  He changed a few wires in the phone system, plugged the router in to my phone jack (I had installed a 2 outlet phone jack when I set my office up because at the time I was still on dialup) and that part was done.  We had DSL to the local office.

We just couldn't get to the internet.

He talked to his suppport people wherever they are.  They ran tests which took way too long and the results totally confused them. They handed us off to other folks who ran more tests and were confused.  We spent the rest  of the day figuring out the folks who put the stuff in the local office had some wires crossed. Once he figured that out and drove down and fixed them things went to working.

The biggest problem I have had so far involves email.  We use gmail and access it with Mozilla Thunderbird.  As I understand it Outlook would have the same trouble.

Everything worked until I tried to send an email.  It would not go.  My smtp server was taking too long to respond.  THAT'S when it's really handy to have a brother who is a professional geek. (and I am going to use terms I don't understand, I'm just repeating things)  Smtp uses port 25 to send email,  DSL for some reason closes access to port 25. No big deal, you go to gmail an turn on IMAP and then set up an account in Thunderbird to access IMAP.  SInce I never removed my read messages from gmail they were all there. I could send test messages to Bob, worked pefectly. We declared it done and I took my wife to supper.

When I came home I discovered it had downloaded and removed all the mail in my gmail account inbox ... all 28,606 of them. I now had 28,606 emails in my Thunderbird inbox.  I had a new copy of every email for the last several years.

Fortunately I got a lot of RAM memory in my desktop when I bought it.  Unfortunately, when you are dealing with 28,000 email it doesn't matter.  Filtering, sorting, deleting .. it all ties up your resources.

So how does it work?  It makes AgTalk lightning fast. Oddly enough, some sites are no faster than they were on WB.  I think that tells me the bottleneck is on their end.  But so far other than my gmail problems the only real change is it works faster most of the time.  And I'm not falling asleep while the pages load (really, I have done that with WB!)

I'm still tweeking the email part of things.  I'm very tempted to just erase it all and start over again.  Then I come to my senses.