I am suspicious that the load on the system from running IDL for SOAP is
part of the problem with dial-up communications, especially given the times
that comms failures have coincided with swap space exhaustion and excessive
numbers of IDL processes. So on a hunch, on Friday while comms were up after
the latest reboot, I moved soap to run at 40 past the hour instead of on the
hour. The hope is that soap runs will not interfere with dial-up and data
transfers, which happen at 5 past the hour. Since that change the dial-up
has not failed, but that is hardly a record. It could be a coincidence.
I asked Tian to remove the mini-tester from the serial link in case it was
too much load and causing some of the serial line signals to fail. It did
not need to be there anyway. The other tester does need to be there since it
is disconnecting the carrier detect between the two modems. However, I doubt
this was really causing the current problems since in that case I doubt the
reboots would have fixed anything.