MIND Troubleshooting Guide

In order to diagnose problems it helps to understand the lay of the land, all the pieces and how they are connected together. Your ability to connect to the Internet depends on a whole bunch of ducks in a row working together. Any one piece and the whole thing basically fails.

Starting with your computer, there is special hardware and software needed to make the connection to the Internet. The hardware is called a modem. There are many brands of modems and they have varying degrees of capabilities to connect at a range of speeds. Further, the ability to stay connected may depend on the quality of the modem (and its software drivers). The amount of memory and the speed of the CPU "may" also affect the speed of your connection.   There are a number of programs in your computer that provide the capability to connect: the Operating System, the dialing program (Dialup Networking), the protocols (NetBUI, IPX & TCP/IP), the browser program (either Explorer or Navigator).

The next link in the chain is the telco equipment. This is where we have had most of our problems of late. The telephone lines were designed to provide only voice grade service. The telephone company makes no claim to provide clean high quality lines for data traffic to the Internet. You are basically lucky if you do get a good line to your house or business. Of course your can pay extra for data quality lines then the phone company will guarantee the quality and the connect speeds. ISDN DSL are two such options. Worse yet, we find ourselves dealing with multiple phone companies along the way and its very easy for them to point fingers in the other direction. A fairly new phenomena, is capacity. There are a fixed number of circuits available to make phone calls from one lata (dialing area) to another. There are certainly not enough to handle everyone getting on the phone at the same time. These bottlenecks can occur either locally or long distance or using cell phones. We constantly see capacity problems during the day, when the Internet slows down, particularly after 11AM EST when the west coast wakes up. So, you can see two types of capacity problems - no circuits available or a slow-down in speed.

In some situations your computer connects to a local area network (LAN), within your house, building or company, before you connect to the telco lines. These LAN's can be traffic bottlenecks as well. In other words, either by design or by usage, the LAN may be slower than the Internet itself. The slowest link in the chain determines the overall speed that you will experience.

Okay, your computer dialed the number and the telco lines carry your desire to connect to a set of modems (that happen to sit in Flint or somewhere else in the State). MIND leases modems in the Flint (SE-Michigan modem pool) and in several other locations in the state. In addition we lease tokens that allow you to connect to the Internet even if you call a modem pool in a location where we do not have physical modems (we leased). We maintain between 1 modem for every 7 to 11 registered account we have. Modems are added to the pool as we add accounts. This is a major part of our cost. Its in yours and our interest to have just the right number of modems so that you connect easily but not have extra, to where we have to raise the membership cost. Most of our time is spent monitoring the utilization of the modems and tokens. Again, its worth emphasizing MIND leases the modems and the connection to the Internet backbone from a company called Merit. Merit controls the type of modems in the modem pool and the capacity of the trunk lines from the modem pools to the backbone. They have added enormous capacity over the last several years but even with the increases that have been made, reaching full capacity is a common occurrence due to the rapid growth of the Internet overall.

When a modem in the Flint Modem pool answers your modem, the userid/password information is sent to our Server for authentication. This Server was replaced at the beginning of the year with a new Dell Server. The server basically provides routing information for all the subsequent traffic between your computer and the places you go on the Internet. The actually browser derived traffic does not go through our Server after the authentication process. On the other hand, E-mail and newsgroup information does. In addition, when you post web pages on our server, traffic will go through this Server. Probably more important than the Server is the trunk line that the Server sits on. This is usually a shared line and another opportunity for a bottleneck in traffic speed. The authentication process requires negligible information to be passed on this trunk line and has very little to do with performance of browsing. It might come into play with large e-mail files or when web pages are accessed on our Server.

Step 1: User Computer Hardware & Modems

Ensure that cables are securely fasten to the back of the wall and your computer. Any time you or someone works in the back of the computer, there is the potential that the cabling gets disconnected or loosened. There is also a remote chance that the modem card in the computer is not seated well. Using a different computer on the same phone line allows you to isolate the problem to the computer hardware or software if the connection is successful with the second computer. Laptops are great for this test.

Step 2: User Computer Software & Settings

There are many varieties of software out there. Way too many to cover all of them here. The following information pertains to Windows 95/98. We will add more on other flavors as time permits.

The modem will try to connect at the highest speed it can then cut back as needed at the beginning of the call. There are settings in the modem program to fix this speed at a lower speed to provide a more reliable connection. In the Control Panel of Windows there is a "Modems" icon. Double clicking on it will show the modem driver (program) that is currently being used. Clicking on properties will show the settings for the modem. You will see under the General tab the Maximum speed setting. This setting is typically at 115200. This is where the adjustments could be made to force lower connect (higher reliability) speeds. If it is a lower number then you might want to try a higher one, if low connect speeds have been a problem. Under the Connection tab, The Data bits should be 8, Parity - None, and Stop bits - 1. In the same tab click Advanced. The check boxes "Use Error Control", "Compress data", "Use flow control", "Hardware" should be the only boxes checked. If you change any of these settings then repeatedly click OK to exit and save settings. If you don't want to save - repeatedly click Cancel.

The next major area to check is the "Dial-up Networking" icon in the control panel. Double clicking on this icon will show which specific modem setups have been made and allow to you make a new one (with Make New Connection). Right click on the connection icon you currently use then select Properties. Under the General tab you will find the phone number for dialing our service (e.g.. 923-2200). Click on the "Server Type" tab. Note the settings in the next two images. Your settings should match the ones in the images.

Click TCP/IP Settings:

Alternate settings for TCP/IP appear in the next image. However, you may find at high traffic times that your experience connecting is more flaky.

The another area for settings is the "Internet" or "Internet Options" icon in the Control Panel. This is where you can set the security levels of your Internet activities. This is very important, your line of defense between outside people (hackers) and your computer. MIND can take no responsibility for how you set up your computer with regards to security. Disabling features like Java, ActiveX, scripting, cookies limits your ability to use advanced features of the Internet but at the same time, these features open up your doors for viruses and attacks on your personal information that may reside on your computer. As a rule of thumb turn as much of this off for the highest level of security. We are willing to discuss these settings with you on a one-on-one basis but will will make no recommendations because this would imply a liability. Since there is such huge potential liability, we can not provide advice on this subject.

Modem Connection Speed Issues Why can't I get 33.6k or 56K speeds from my home or business?

Step 3: Local wiring at User Location

Recently we gone out to some of our subscribers who had intermittent success, low connection speeds, or chronic drops while connecting to MIND. In resolving the problems, we found it to be a case of wiring in the subscribers building. Please understand that the 56K modems are very sensitive to static noise or other problems related to wiring. You can do a lot to correct these problems yourself or contact the phone company. MIND is not responsible for your wiring but we will help put you in touch with troubleshooters who may charge for their time in resolving some of these thorny issues. The phone company only takes responsibility for the wiring to your house. They will check and fix internal wiring for a charge. Others can do the same thing.

A more complex environment is having a LAN. Wiring, software and hardware has to be checked by a very knowledgeable person if your problem is here.

Step 4: Telco Connection

One way to check the cause of a problem is to find another way of connecting to the MIND service, isolating different parts of the system. One example of this is calling a different phone number that is used in a different area of the state. Obviously this is a toll call and we are not recommending that you do this all the time, only for testing purposes. Alternate numbers are available under "Contact Information" on the MIND Homepage. Keep some of these in hard copy for when you need them either when traveling or for testing. If you can connect easier using an alternate number then the problem is the phone company.

Step 5: Userid & Password

Did you pay you bill? Just kidding but if you can't get on particularly after the renewal period and you have been extremely late sending in your payment, your account will be suspended until it is paid. More likely, we have found that - people forget, mistype or someone changed the password on an account. This can be checked and remedied by calling the help line 832-2344 and have your password reset.

Still need assistance? E-mail MIND for technical support