Well in 7.2+ 2/3rds of the how-to is already done, so no patching and recompiling of the kernel is needed. It was litually just installing the driver and making a few minor changes in a couple of scripts.
Fair point. I was working on a 7.1 system, and I wasn't sure which bits were already done for me by SuSE.
Fortunately - or unfortunately depending on your viewpoint - the driver doesn't work on SMP machines, and as that's all he has,
Thats a USB issue AFAIK, USB does not 'wok right' with Windows either. USB2 was meant to address that, but has introduced a number of security issues.
Actually I went to the link at sourceforge you gave and found a totally different thing to what I was using. I must have been working with the more complex "kernel module" version it talks about. Also, having checked the appropriate list's archives, it does seem that the "user space" version you're using is OK with SMP systems. Perhaps I was a bit premature there...
I had it running under Windows for the best part of a year, and I averaged 3-4 days uptime, under Linux I am managing about 25-30 days. It also seams faster, but I am not sure what utility I should use for measuring my connection speed.
Only 3-4 weeks under Linux? That's pretty poor actually! Do you have any reason to believe that this unreliability is being caused by the modem driver? The real reason my friend wanted a Linux machine doing the connection work was for security. I told him to take an old P166 machine he has and put it between his Windows gateway (with the modem) and his internal network. The Windows box will still be vunerable, but having a Linux firewall in there will at least protect his network's data... -- 8:38am up 35 days, 17:03, 2 users, load average: 0.11, 0.10, 0.05