Modem worked once but no longer...

[Badut]

Fresh install of FC4. I used the internet connection wizard to setup my dial-up account.

All was working great. I manage to get on the net and get decent (for dial-up) download speed for about 4 hours.

After 4 hours, I disconnected and tried to reconnect again - and here is where the trouble starts. I'm able to dial and connect to the ISP. The modems do their handshake thing and things look good. But the moment I open Firefox or yumex (anything that requires bandwidth), the connection gets disconnected.

I've tried tinkering with baud rate, flow control, modem init string. All without any improvement.

This is costing me a small fortune in phone calls to troubleshoot.

Can anyone advise what might be wrong? Or suggest something I have overlooked?

Some extra info:

1) The modem is an external Pragmatic 56k.

2) I don't think it's the phone line or the ISP because I am able to get online with my other computer that's also on dial-up with the same ISP on the same phone socket. And as I said, it stays connected until I open firefox or yumex.

3) I installed a whole bunch of stuff through yum during the first 4 hours I was online. From memory, it was yumex, perl, maelstrom, some SDL stuff. I'm don't think this should affect anything.

4) I've used the same computer and modem to get online in the past and it worked well. That was with WindowsXP though.

[tashirosgt]

Run kppp, pick "confiigure" and see if the internet connection wizard did the settings correctly. Does the connection get immediately disconnected when you open Firefox?

[Badut]

Thanks, I will try kppp tonight when I get home.

One more question:

I've been trying to set some of the modem init strings. I was thinking S91=15 (signal strength) and S10=255 (time delay before hang up after loss of carrier) might help. However, when I add these strings to the modem hardware configuration or if I add them in wvdial.conf, the modem won't dial at all. Am I doing something wrong?