Re: Dialup re dials after inactivity

On Fri, 17 Jun 2005 19:07:35 -0400, "Richard Urban"

>If you installed a competent firewall program similar to ZoneAlarm, you
>would get a warning as to what is trying to dial out. It is likely that you
>have an unwanted visitor on your computer - called a rouge dialer.

Hmm... wouldn't have to be a dialer, if he's set an ICS host to allow
software to initiate a connection. Anything that nudges TCP/IP
outside the subnet mask will likely trigger a dial-up attempt, whereas
without these settings, it would either quietly give up, or pop up
some sort of error, without being allowed to try.

Over here, we get charged per second for calls to local phone numbers,
including ISPs. So we detest trash that initiates a DUN session.

You must remember that Internet software assumes networking is always
present. It says "get me so-and-so", and the OS will then try to find
that on the network. When that network's TCP/IP, and it can't find
anything on the LAN, it will try through the gateway, and that is what
is initiating dial-up in this situation.

These days, so much stuff ASSumes Internet access is always available,
and will try its luck calling home - typically to "check for updates".
Even a rubbishy little mouse drivers and screen savers may call home
for "updates", as if it's impossible to write 1M of code without
screwing up. Then, once you're online, chances are something will
call out every x minutes, where x < z, and z is the time the OS waits
before considering the connection "idle" and disconnecting it.

Result: PC dials out, racks up phone charges, never hangs up.

As you can imagine, where phone calls cost money, we never allow
software to initiate a dial-up connection :-)



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