The Travelling Modem

"Our city has the best carnivals in Brazil," said my Salvador friend. That did not help much. I had all kind of problems throughout South America.
In Brazil, modem calls are done using pulse. Tone dialing gives strange error messages. In Argentina, Uruguay, and Japan, tone dialling works fine.
In Brazil, you must have a special adapter for getting your modem connected to the line. It is different from anything you've ever seen. I got one from a friend. You will probably have to buy one from Embratel, the local telephone company. In the other countries, I could get away with a standard U.S. RJ-11 plug. Stick it in, and dial.
However, in some hotels, it is still impossible to get connected to the phone line. It ends up in a hole in the wall. At the Marina Palace Hotel in Rio de Janeiro, the man with the toolbox came, and installed a connection for my modem in my hotel room. All it took was a simple request.
In Recife, I had to dial 0, ask the lady at the switchboard to give me a city line, and then finally, I could dial my local Internet provider. After some training, it worked like a dream.
All over the place, line quality was generally good. However, in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, I often found myself fighting the busy signal for hours.

Getting my mail

Wherever the GSM cellular setup worked, it was really easy. I just logged on like I do at home to retrieve and send mail. Nothing to it, really, except it was definitely the easiest solution.
Earlier, I have often used CompuServe for my Internet mail when travelling abroad. A simple forward command to my local access providers, and all mail is redirected to my CompuServe account. Example:

   echo "75755.1327@compuserve.com" >~/.forward

CompuServe can be reached with a local call in many cities around the world. With software like TAPCIS, it is easy to use. The only drawback is cost.
This autumn, I wanted to test Pegasus Mail, Eudora, and Netscape over SLIP or PPP connections. CompuServe was to serve as my backup solution.
Sure, it is possible to dial long distance to Norway for mail. However, in Brazil, the rate was around US$4.00 per minute. It is often better and cheaper to borrow local access to the net from friends.
At home, I connect to the Internet using Trumpet Winsock. This was the method I was planning on using. When connected, you can theoretically send and receive mail from/through your host back home without making any changes to the setup. This is what I set up to do.

Trumpet Winsock setup

A friend in Tokyo borrowed me his user ID and password for a 28.800 bps PPP connection to the net. I made a new disk catalog called /TRAVEL, copied my old version of Trumpet Winsock there, and installed it under Windows 3.1 as a new application named "Travel."
The next step was to edit LOGIN.CMD for dialing through a PBX, to add the local phone number, my friend's user name and password. The TRUMPWSK.INI file needed a new IP number, Gateway number, Netmask, DNS, Domain, etc. I was ready to go.
The V.34 modem was inserted into the PCMCIA port. The phone cable was connected. A call, CONNECT, and 57 new messages landed on my disk. Easy!
A few weeks later, I was in Brazil. From now on, I asked my friends to give me all Winsock directory files on a diskette. In Sao Paulo, I also learned to ask for a separate list of local phone numbers, access user name, and password! My local friend had claimed that the password was included in his Trumpet Winsock files. This was wrong, and it was too late at night to call for help. No mail was handled that day.
My attitude towards Trumpet Winsock has always been to get it in place, and then forget about it. Therefore, I did not know that the program could be used in so many different ways.
Some LOGIN.CMD versions automated the submission of user name and password. Everything was there. Others stopped, and asked me to enter the data manually.
Some access providers had dynamical allocation of IP numbers. The number given in Trumpet's Setup (click on File, Setup to view), had to be manually entered after each call.
In other cities, I could set Trumpet's IP number as 0.0.0.0. The result was that Trumpet Winsock would automatically adjust itself to use the correct IP number after logon.
In Montevideo, I had to use a given IP number when calling the access node. The access provider's host told me about the proper IP number to use once the connection was established. Click on File, Setup, add the IP number, and then click on OK.
Now, the program complained: "You will need to restart Trumpet Winsock for the network setup to take effect." However, in this case I was to ignore the warning. When dialling manually, the only thing I had to do at this stage was to press the ESC button to start PPP, and get going.

Checking the connection

Sometimes, I was in doubt whether my connection to the Internet was correctly established. Nothing worked. In other instances, I wondered whether my email host back in Norway was reachable.
Whenever this was the case, I used the PING utility (Packet INternet Groper). It sends a message to a given host, and awaits an answer. Networkers call the message an "ICMP echo request packet." Reports about success, errors, and statistics will be returned to you. It gives you the time taken for your packets to travel across the network too.
In my application, all the details were less important. If I wondered whether the host ulrik.uio.no was reachable, then I clicked on the Ping ikon. The program asked for a host address, I entered "ulrik.uio.no," and pressed Enter.
If the program just hang there without giving any reports, then I knew that either the connection to the net was bad, or the host unreachable. To check if the first problem was the case, I opened another Ping copy, and tried to reach another host. If unsuccessful, I went off hook to reconnect.
If the remote host was indeed unreachable, then the only thing to do was to wait a few hours and try again.

Email with Pegasus and Eudora

One very important item in the setup of these programs is the information about where to get incoming mail (the POP3 address). Unless you're forwarding mail to a local host, you can leave this line the way you have it when at home.
The SMTP address line is where you insert the address of the host that is to send your outgoing mail. If the network connection is good, you can leave it like it is. If effective transfer speed is low, then you should seriously consider to use a local SMTP host instead.
I left the setups as they were at home, and, while in Brazil, was punished accordingly.
Most of my incoming mail is distributed between two hosts. Critical mail goes to ulrik.uio.no, while non-critical mail goes to gaia.grida.no. While travelling, I concentrated on retrieving from the ulrik host.
In some cities, the conditions were particularly challenging. For example, in Florianopolis and Rio de Janeiro, my mail files snailed towards me at just 40 cps, or even slower. Very annoying. Getting my mail took hours.
Eudora (version 1.4) and Pegasus Mail (version 1.2) has indeed been exposed to varying and difficult conditions. My experiences with these two fine shareware programs are:

• Pegasus has superior features. A favorite when conditions are good.
• Eudora is more robust when conditions are more difficult. Where Pegasus gives up (without any informative explanations), Eudora often copes.

Saved by FTP

In Tokyo and Recife, I successfully retrieved email from gaia.grida.no, but was unable to get mail from ulrik.uio.no. Don't ask me why. Here, I had to use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to get it.
This is easy enough, if you know how. The FTPW.EXE utility is distributed as part of the Trumpet Winsock package, as is PING.EXE. Click on the FTPW ikon, and enter the desired host's address. At "login:." enter user name, and password as usual. If your host is a Unix computer, then you may find your mail in the /usr/spool/mail directory. Transfer your mail using a GET FILE-NAME command ("FILE-NAME" is probably the same as your login name).
The safest approach is to move the file to your home catalog on the mail host before starting the transfer. This allows you to delete the file after retrieval without losing mail that has arrived while retrieving, and you avoid having to retrieve read mail again later.
If you retrieve your mail by FTP, you may find it practical to load the file into Windows Notepad or Write for reading. From there, it is easy to copy quotes into your Pegasus or Eudora replies.
Recommendation: If you want it simple, and is limited by Notepad's features, consider retrieving the shareware program Notebook. For example, it allows you to open and edit very large files. I have done this successfully with a 1.5 megabyte mail file.
It's search ikon is a gem when working with email. You'll need to have VBRUN300.DLL on your disk to run it. I retrieved my version from ftp://ftp.cnl.com.au/VBRUN300.DLL . Desired shareware contribution is US$12.00 to Ron Parker (Email: Ron2222@aol.com)

Email by Netscape

While travelling, I got hold of a version of Netscape capable of sending (SMTP) and retrieving mail (POP3). It sure worked fine, and was an important improvement, but offline mail (send later) was not possible at the time. For this reason, Netscape was dropped as unpractical. Besides, it does not have mail handling functionality competitive with the other two programs.
Note: As of version 2.04b, available after my return to Norway, Netscape has offline mail.

CompuServe blues

Things change. When I travelled Brazil two years ago, the maximum logon speed to CompuServe was 2.400 bits/s. Now, they have 14.400 bits/s. I had connect both at 12.000 and 14.400 bps from my hotel room in Salvador.
The local number for CompuServe in Brazil is 000671. In some hotels, this was like asking for trouble. At Hotel Castelinho in Recife, it was flat out impossible to dial the number. My guess is that Embratel, the phone company, has blocked all numbers appearing to be calling card numbers, and the CompuServe number definitely is in this group.
In Rio de Janeiro, the hotel made me pay international rates for using this number. The switchboard software is probably classifying anything starting with "00" as foreign calls. In Sao Paulo, the effect was the opposite. The switchboard computer did not register my calls at all!
If you must use CompuServe, and it does not work, your best bet is to change hotels. The people in the reception knows nothing. The people at Embratel know nothing. You will probably be put in contact with a lady working for AT&T in the US, but neither she can reply.
You will save yourself a lot of headache by moving to another hotel!

The Online World Monitor newsletter

The newsletter and the book were companions. While the book describes the online world as it is, the newsletter tracked changes. It could more freely focus on selected offerings or phenomena than could be done within the strict framework of the book.

This issue of the newsletter had the following contents:

1. The Alta Vista search engine
2. The travelling modem
3. Update on Internet trends
4. Web Watch

For more about the newsletter, see monitor.html
KIDLINK: http://www.kidlink.org

Feel free to redistribute as long as the text remains intact as it appears here (including this paragraph). Permission to quote/excerpt/reference in other media is hereby granted, so long as cited material is identified as coming from The Online World Monitor newsletter. For any other use, contact the author for permission.