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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: S100 who wrote (4311)	3/12/2002 12:22:36 AM
From: S100	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12231

Win-XP kills Verizon DSL By Thomas C Greene in Washington Posted: 03/11/2002 at 13:29 EST On Friday morning my Verizon DSL Internet access died. This was hardly unusual, so I paid it no mind and simply took an unscheduled long weekend. But Saturday morning it was still dead, and there were no reports of service outages in my area. Clearly this would require some looking into. I experimented a bit and came to suspect that the issue was on Verizon's side. And so it was, with an interesting twist courtesy of Microsoft, I eventually confirmed; but let's not get ahead of ourselves. It's a good thing I didn't have any social obligations until Saturday night; when all was said and done, Verizon had taken seven hours of my time in exasperating, repetitive, futile interactions with their tech support staff, and no doubt a few months off my lifespan. snip snip The problem, he explained, was that the Verizon router had locked me out permanently, so I'd have to be associated with a different one. He switched me over, and that was that. The cause of this problem, however, originates in Windows-XP. As anyone who uses PPPoE (Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet) with ADSL will tell you, the MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) has to be set to 1492 or less. On Win-XP, it's set by default to 1500, which causes your machine to irritate a naturally anti-social router, which may then shut you out. Microsoft is clearly aware of the problem, as this bulletin shows; but XP nevertheless persists in setting up PPPoE with an MTU of 1500. The bulletin offers a registry hack for PPPoE users; but there is no patch, and there is no longer a GUI network-setting dialog which enables the user to change MTU conveniently. Win-9x requires the use of third-party PPPoE software, and this (should) automatically set MaxMTU correctly. The problem is peculiar to XP, which insists on setting up PPPoE on its own, and gets it wrong. Linux is also not affected, as the Roaring Penguin RP-PPPoE package handles MTU properly as well. So long as I stay away from Win-XP -- and that's hardly going to be a problem -- I shouldn't experience further difficulties with my DSL connection. snip theregus.com