Chad writes:

> We would like to increase the speed of my dial-up connections to the
>  HP3000.  I do not want my modems connected to a DTC.
>
>  Can I do dial-up VT using Reflection?

No. Yes. Sort of (see below).


>  What hardware/software is needed?

Any terminal emulator and a DTC. But see below.


>  BTW, I really feel stupid asking these questions, the answer is probably
>  very simple.

The simple answer is to use a DTC -- but that doesn't mean that you can't make
the solution more complicated. There are proxy modem servers out there on the
market that allow you to essentially become your own ISP (thumb through the
standard networking catalogs and you'll find them).

Once you dial in and your scripts properly handshake, you connect to your
HP3000's using the HP3000s' IP addresses. However, I've never been
particularly enthusiastic about this solution, given that we (as a group) have
such a simple way of doing it now (DTCs). Nonetheless, we do have some
customers who are doing this -- but they invariably started putting their
internal LAN together several years ago, from a PC point of view, and attached
the HP3000 only recently as an afterthought.

I find supporting these customers very difficult. They tend to throw away
their standard dial-in modem access method (a modem connected to a DTC) -- and
because of that, I have to rewrite my dial-in script just to support them
individually (and each of them is different). Rather than actually do this,
due to the simple pain involved of spending half a day to get dial-in
correctly done, we now just FedEx everything to them -- and thus support
issues that could be resolved in a day generally take a week.

However, the customers I'm beginning to love, just as an aside, are those who
have made the full transition to internet-based telnet and have an internet-
accessible IP address. If you want network speeds, this is the only way to go.
File transfer times generally drop significantly. Better yet, with the
internet, there's no worry about leaving a phone line open to Pittsburgh over
the weekend.

Wirt Atmar