I would have sworn that I'd sent this earlier, but it hasn't shown up in my digests . . .
I picked up a thinkpad 755c, 486/50, 30/340 to use at home in the evenings. I need to accomplish a pair of ways to connect to the machine on my desk. a) by serial port to the machine on my desk by ppp. I'm assuming that this is easy enough that I don't need help :) b) by the 9600 ISN (not ISDN) line into my university apartment. It can tie this up all of the time; I'd like it to try to maintain this connection if it drops. I"d also like it to keep it's mouth shut and not constantly tell me about the status of the connection. While this is an 8 bit connection, XON/XOFF are trapped by the hardware. I'd like not to completely waste these two bits; it's only 4 of the 256 combos that are useless, and going to 6 bits seems like overkill. c) the 14.4 modem. This is an 8 bit clean connection that can get me to the university network, and thereby to this computer. I'd like to use this in addition to the 9600 connection by load balancing. The catch (or is it?): it has twice the capacity of the 6 bit 9600. Is this a problem? Ideally, it would check on it's own every couple of minutes for a) & c) when it doesn't have a valid network. These would run off the same serial port, so it would need to recognize which to use by the response it gets. Ideas? suggestions? rick -- These opinions will not be those of ISU until it pays my retainer.
