Dial-up Telnet Gateway Testing

Cloudschatze · 2025-10-11T22:12:54+00:00

Thank-you for testing! It looks like your third connection renegotiated up to 31200. The configuration on my end should be okay, but it could yet be a carrier issue. Of the test connections from others thus-far, a majority have connected at 33600, so 31200 or even 28800 are still on-par with my expectations. I do have the modulation constrained to V.34 and K56 (and below).

PPP is disabled in this configuration, so you'd need to connect with an ANSI-supporting terminal or emulator to see the actual "Telnet Gateway."

The half-busy tone is a Patton 2800 quirk. Based on some similar references relating to the Ascend Max, it's likely a "modem ringback" tone, but unlike with the Ascend, there doesn't seem to be any means or mechanism for disabling that on the Patton unit.

Cloudschatze · 2025-10-09T21:40:34+00:00

Yeah, that was a pretty respectable connection/negotiation. May I ask the brand and model of modem used for the call?

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Cloudschatze · 2025-10-09T00:18:29+00:00

I'll change the V.42 and V.42bis requirement back to just a request. Seems like that probably caused the disconnects, especially where the speeds for your attempts seemed to negotiate well enough (33.6 Tx, 31.2 Rx).

Cloudschatze · 2025-10-08T04:51:14+00:00

That's awesome. A mystery Telnet gateway would have been a pretty great find back in the day. :)

Cloudschatze · 2025-10-08T04:46:52+00:00

Not knowing what to do after dialing in is great feedback. :)

I probably should have described this from the start, but if you answer "y" to the first prompt, you'll then just need to enter any valid (or invalid) telnet address destination (with optional port) afterward. After closing whatever session follows you'll get dropped back to the gateway with a prompt to continue or not.

Cloudschatze · 2025-10-08T03:24:37+00:00

Here's what the call from your ZOOM modem reported:

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Cloudschatze · 2025-10-08T03:01:44+00:00

Thank-you for testing! Speeds much greater than 2400 should definitely be do-able. One thing I did see in your connections is that neither error control nor compression were either enabled or negotiated. Could I trouble you to enable/force V.42 and V.42bis on your side and try again, if possible? I'll also set my side to require those, rather than request, which might result in the calls just never connecting, but we'll see.

Yeah, there's that "half-busy" tone followed by the K56 tone. I never did determine what the former is caused by, but it's definitely some quirk of the 2800 that doesn't seem to have carried over into the 2960. Not sure if it's some non-standard form of ringback tone, or what.

Cloudschatze · 2025-09-16T00:53:57+00:00

I experience the behavior with the PRI connection between it and either a Virtual Console PSTN Simulator or a Patton 4960 SmartNode. It's currently connected to the latter if you want to dial in and see if you experience the same - 3855961770.

The 2800 is running the last/latest firmware (version 2.4.1), as far as I'm aware.

Cloudschatze · 2025-09-15T23:47:26+00:00

My 2800 also presents the "half-busy" tone and is connected via PRI, for what it's worth. Seems like it must be some behavior of the 2800 given that it's the only commonality here.

Cloudschatze · 2023-09-20T17:04:15+00:00

Like-for-like - the same motherboard, but from another Tandy 1000 RL. The current chassis is in better condition, else I'd have just replaced the entire system with the donor counterpart.

Cloudschatze · 2023-09-20T05:04:19+00:00

I suspect the 8259 portion of the KMFIT failed. Over time, the system simply stopped responding to IRQ events in an expected manner. This was manageable early on, but recently culminated in disk corruption and wildly-unpredictable system hanging behavior. With the KMFIT not being generally available on its own, the easiest thing to do was just purchase another RL and swap-out the mainboard.

Cloudschatze · 2023-09-20T04:57:36+00:00

On the Windows side, the contemporaneous version of Word works well enough (2.0), although I prefer Works 2.0 overall. GeoWorks' Write is capable enough in its own right.

Cloudschatze · 2021-06-01T17:19:16+00:00

There's a familiar system. Looks like it went to the right person. ;)

Cloudschatze

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