Serious dial-up issues with iChat and Mail

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Level 1

10 points

Serious dial-up issues with iChat and Mail

I've got three Macs on a network: G4 Mac Mini, G4 PowerBook, and a MacBook Pro all upgraded to Leopard. I live in a rural setting and am stuck with dial-up for the moment. My usual set-up with Tiger was to connect the Mini via dial-up via the Juno service. This is set to share the connection via Ethernet to Airport Express. Typically there is only one user at a time accessing either the MacBook Pro or the g4 Powerbook via the wireless share. In Tiger this worked perfectly. iChatting, web, and email all worked flawlessly. Every now and then a large download in Mail or Safari might time out but only large downloads 4mb or larger and rarely.

Since upgrading to Leopard none of the Macs can send an email with lots of content... say somewhere around 70 kb or more. Inline text or an attachment, does not matter... it will time out. This happens whether directly connected via the phone or via the wireless share to the Mini. iChat is also nearly useless with time out errors between each bubble of text sent as well as frequent disconnects. Adium also has problems with basic text chat. I've tried connecting the PowerBook via Juno directly to bypass possible problems with the Mini and it is experiencing the exact same problems when connected. Web browsing is perfectly fine as are ftp transfers. The problem seems to be limited to AIM (regardless of client) and email.

Thoughts?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Oct 30, 2007 8:55 AM

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Answer 1

denny henke Author

Level 1

10 points

Oct 30, 2007 1:32 PM in response to denny henke

Hmmm... well, I've found this article:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/10/29/alook-at-leopards-network-e nhancements

that discusses a change in the automatic TCP buffer sizing. I wonder if that might be causing a problem? If Apple is tuning the network for broadband connections those of us on dial-up might have some problems.

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Answer 2

denny henke Author

Level 1

10 points

Nov 5, 2007 9:03 PM in response to denny henke

Wow... no replies... bummer. I've noticed others getting the same error with iChat and at least a couple threads regarding flakey/slow sending via smtp and Leopard. I'm not seeing any resolution in those threads and my guess is this will require a software update. Just want to make sure I'm not overlooking a hard to get to network setting somewhere.

Any ideas?

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Answer 3

denny henke Author

Level 1

10 points

Dec 20, 2007 2:46 PM in response to denny henke

I seem to have solved my various internet related problems and the source problem is the software provided by my dial-up isp, JUNO. The solution was to connect directly via OS X network preferences using PPP. In the past I've always used the JUNO software to connect. Earlier today it occurred to me that I have never even tired to bypass the JUNO software. Since logging on via Leopard's built in PPP I've not had any iChat errors and am also now able to send larger emails via smtp. So, perhaps in my case the culprit was an incompatibility between Leopard and the JUNO software.

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