An unusual problem

[irvine_himself]

A friend has given me a free Internet connection from a dial up modem over a business line to his server and hence to the outside world.

I am using "NetMeter" to monitor the connection speed which is normally pathetic, (4KB/s) although occasionally astounding, (max of 30 KB/s)

Because I have control of both ends of the dial up connection and it is essentially a private line, I am certain that this connection should be tunable to give a vastly improved level of service.

I have a couple of vague ideas on how to go about doing this:

1) At the moment the server relays each packet to me before requesting the next packet. Would having the server download the entire web page independently of the speed I can receive at make a difference?

2) Since I have access to both ends of the connection, does anybody have any ideas on tuning this connection?

My laptop runs on Xp and the server runs on Centos, (Linux.)

Though my friend has given me a carte blanche, his system administrator and I have differences and I would prefer to be well informed before approaching him.

[SimpleC]

I think you're going to run into issues here from experience. Most administrators don't like the idea of fixing a wheel that seems to be working fine. A good modem will help (not the cheapy types), depending on the manufactorer there are tweaks available that might allow you to tweak some of the signalling between modem and server.

When it comes to dial-up, I can tell you a very often overlooked issue that's actually kinda simple. Take a screwdriver and make sure that all wired connections are tight and clean. This sometimes in and of itself helps out quite a bit.