Vaughan Bezuidenhout wrote:
>
> The dial up modem on sme 6.0 BETA disconnects , waits +- 2
> minutes and redials again , creating unnecessary phone costs,
> whilst no user has requested an internet/e-mail connection.
This is one of SME's real problems. The way it was designed assumed dial-up accounts with no connection charges. Several of us have had major phone bill crisis, particularly those whose modems dial silently.
You need to look for other things trigering a connection like...
1. Intruders such as worms and adware. These things don't ask your permission to dial.
2. Hardware with a propensity to ring home. The classic example is those little printservers that plug directly into the back of a printer and connect to the network. Quite a few of them have settings that cause them to look for updates to their software at regular intervals - some even have an automatic switch to the manufacturers website to give you a help page explaining why a print job messed up!!!
3. Microsoft report-back-to-base services like the "your computer has just recovered from an event triggered by one of our programmer's complete inability to cope with the complexity of our OS, so I'm just going to broadcast this fact back to base" messages that keep popping up in Windows XP. Or the Windows components that assume they have a God given right to look up the colour of the hair on the programmers backside every time you use them, like the Windows &^%$£?|! Media Player.
4. Your email gathering frequency is set at 5 minutes!!!!!
There are loads more, but basically SME will dial everytime anything asks for an address outside the local domain, and it doesn't have a facility to ask you whether it should or not. The only viable solutions are a dial-up account with no online charges or turning off the modem except when you want to go online
Ed Form
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