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Copyright 1998-2024, Southern California OS/2 User Group. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

SCOUG, Warp Expo West, and Warpfest are trademarks of the Southern California OS/2 User Group. OS/2, Workplace Shell, and IBM are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation. All other trademarks remain the property of their respective owners.

The Southern California OS/2 User Group
USA

SCOUG OS/2 For You - April 1998


 Dear Mr. Know-It-All 

Mr. Know-It-All always has the answers to even the really tough questions.


 

Q.  Dear Mr. Know-It-All,

I wanted to play with the Win32-OS/2 beta and convert some Windows 95 programs to OS/2.  But the converter requires that the Win95 programs first be installed while running Windows 95 (then you boot OS/2 and run the converter).  So I installed Windows 95 in a blank partition I created with Partition Magic.  Now my Boot Manager doesn’t work and my machine boots straight to Windows 95.  I haven’t played around with anything to try to fix it yet, but if Microsoft hosed my system I’m gonna shoot somebody.

A.  No need for violence.  To set your mind at ease (and keep your finger off that trigger), when you boot, your machine’s BIOS steps through all the partitions on your disk until it gets to the “active” one, which it loads and “boots”.  Normally, Boot Manager is the active partition, and it then loads and “boots” the partition that you choose, but the Windows 95 installation program switched the “active” status from the Boot Manager partition to its own Windows 95 partition.  Your Boot Manager partition is still there with all its info (Microsoft wouldn’t think of doing something malicious), so you just have to use one of several simple methods to make the Boot Manager partition “active” again so it will run when you next boot your system.  Any of these should work to make Boot Manager active:

Once the Boot Manager partition is active again, you should be running as you were before.

 

Q.  Dear Mr. Know-It-All,

When the technical people at work talk about the Internet, they sometimes use the terms T1, T3, SLIP and PPP.  What are these things?

A.  T1 and T3 are kinds of telephone service.  A T1 line runs at 1.544 megabits per second (Mbps), and a T3 runs at 45 Mbps.  For comparison, a “56K” modem runs at 0.056 Mbps (actually, it runs slower than that during typical usage), a “cable modem” runs at somewhere around 0.5 Mbps (this is a “ballpark” figure since there’s lots of different cable modems and their speeds are all different), and an Ethernet network connection runs at 10 Mbps (although the actual data throughput may be lower).  So, a T1 is a lot faster than your “56K” modem, and a lot slower than your office LAN connection.  (There are also T2 and T4 lines which run at 6.312 Mbps and 274.176 Mbps, respectively.)  The last time I priced a local T1 line, it was about $1,500 a month.

SLIP and PPP are methods of sending data over (typically) a “plain old voice grade” telephone line to your Internet Service Provider (ISP).  SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol) is pretty stupid; it just breaks the data into blocks called “frames”, sticks an “END” byte on the end of each frame, and sends the data out over the wires.  At the other end, the “END” byte is removed and the frames are stuck back together to recreate the file being sent.  (The “END” byte has the value 192 decimal, which is C0 hexadecimal or 300 octal.  If any bytes with that value are in the actual data being sent, they’re converted into a special “ESCAPE” two-byte sequence so the receiving computer doesn’t think the data has ended, and the two-byte “ESCAPE” sequence is converted back to the proper value once it’s in the other computer.)

PPP is Point-to-Point Protocol, and it’s as smart as SLIP is stupid.  The computers at both ends of a PPP connection talk to each other before any data is sent and decide on what (if any) special transmission options they want to use.  In addition, PPP connections talk to each other while data is being transferred between them.  SLIP and PPP both send data at about the same speed (PPP has slightly more overhead), but PPP is more robust and can help find transmission problems while SLIP can’t.  SLIP wasn’t originally an Internet standard and still isn’t, but it is now documented (see ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1055.txt).  PPP has always been an Internet standard (see ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1661.txt).

 

Curious or in doubt, ask Mr. Know-It-All.  He gets email at MrKIA@SCOUG.COM.

Mr. Know-It-All lives in Southern California.


The Southern California OS/2 User Group
P.O. Box 26904
Santa Ana, CA 92799-6904, USA

Copyright 1998 the Southern California OS/2 User Group. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

SCOUG is a trademark of the Southern California OS/2 User Group.
OS/2, Workplace Shell, and IBM are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation.
All other trademarks remain the property of their respective owners.