DEMON INTERNET LTD ================== 42 Hendon Lane Finchley London N3 1TT 081-349 0063 (London) 031-552 0344 (Edinburgh) email internet@demon.net DEMON.TXT - GENERAL INFORMATION ON DEMON AND ON MAKING A CONNECTION. Last updated 30th May 1994 The latest version of this document is available from ftp.demon.co.uk:/pub/doc/Demon.txt Contents ======== 1. The Service 2. Background 3. Servers and Connectivity 4. Internet Growth 5. How to Contact Us 6. Types of Connection 7. The Login Sequence 8. The Demon Machines 9. Archimedes Users 10. Sundry Connection Information 11. Setting up NetManage Chameleon 12. Yellow Pages 13. Other Information 1. The Service ============== We are offering a direct connection to the world-wide Internet. There are various different services offered, as listed in Services.txt, but the basic Dial-Up connection provides powerful connection with your computer becoming a node on the Internet. You get an Internet Address and become part of our domain. An example is: 158.152.7.25 yourmc.demon.co.uk where you decide the name of your nodename "yourmc". You can have unlimited mail address at the name e.g.: Examples: grahame@yourmc.demon.co.uk cliff@yourmc.demon.co.uk postmaster@yourmc.demon.co.uk When you log on you will be connected to the Internet so that you may perform transfers directly between your computer and other nodes all over the world. You will be able to have multiple sessions so that you can up/download mail/news, transfer files and use information services all at the same time. You must use software capable of talking the Internet Protocol - this will be either SLIP or PPP. We have free software for all types of computer and considerable expertise in these matters and will be happy to advise you. Please read the file Welcome.txt for other general information about our service and the Internet. 2. Background ============= The staff of Demon Systems Ltd, an established software house, started Demon Internet on 1st June 1992 and it was the first system in the United Kingdom to offer low cost full and complete Internet access. It still provides unrivalled power and value for money today. It was started based on the encouragement of about 100 founder members who discussed the idea on a conferencing system, Compulink Information Exchange, and were brave enough to pay a years subscription in advance. Our ambitions were to attain just 200 members in the first year to cover our anticipated financial outlay, ignoring any time spent. After about two weeks we realised we needed nearer 400. At May 1994 we have over 5,000 subscribers. All revenues have been used to supply more resource so that our service will grow along with its membership. Demon Systems has always specialised in professional customer support for its relatively few Clients - those skills have been successfully extended to handle thousands of Clients on Internet. 3. Servers and Connectivity =========================== The service runs on a selection of Suns and Apricot Unix machines centred around our Network Operation Centre in Finchley. Connected via Ethernet, as well as various routers, is the news server (news.demon.co.uk) which is a Sparc IPX (dis.demon.co.uk). A Sun Sparc 10 post.demon.co.uk. handles the mail. Nether.demon.co.uk, a Sparc, handles routing. ftp.demon.co.uk is another Sun which is our ftp server. It is our policy to use distributive processing as we believe this can provide us with the most powerful, value for money, hardware redundant setup. We have a 256K line connected to Sprintlink in the United States making us a totally independent Internet service provider. We peer with EUNet and PIPEX to ensure good connectivity in Great Britain as well as having on order a 384K line to the JANET/JIPS UK academic network. We are proud to have a direct line into the Department of Computing Imperial College London (doc.ic.ac.uk) from our Central London PoP (styx.demon.co.uk). doc.ic is the biggest ftp and archie site in Europe. We have over 150 dial up lines operating in racks of US Robotics V32bis modems on all digital exchanges. In addition we have a number of dedicated phone lines for our network customers, private staff numbers etc. We have may PoPs (Points of Presence) bringing local call access to a large proportion of the UK. Our central London PoP provides leased line connections at a cheaper rate for those customers in the 071 area. Further lines and PoPs are being added continuously. 4. Internet Growth ================== You may have heard that use of the Internet is growing at a very fast rate. The take-up of our service certainly bears this out as it is averaging about 25% per month. This take up varies a great deal and has caught us out on occasion. We respond quickly to this but are held up sometimes by the delivery of equipment and leased lines etc.. We are committed to providing enough resource for current as well as expected take up but if you are caught in one of our peaks (or troughs depending on how you look at it) then please bear with us as we always make every effort to make these periods as short as possible. 5. How to Contact us ==================== The contact points for us are: Office number (Sales etc.) 081-349 0063 Edinburgh office number (Sales etc.) 031-552 0344 Help Line 081-343 3881 The help line is available 9am to 9pm on working weekdays. It closes between 12:30pm and 2pm. After 9pm please call for emergencies only unless otherwise advised on the night. Fax 081-349 0309 Dial up modem lines:London 112 081-343 4848 Warrington 8 0925 411383 (Local to Manchester and Liverpool) Edinburgh 8 031-552 8883 Reading 8 0734 328989 Sunderland 8 091-522 5005 (Local to Newcastle and Durham) Yorkshire PoP: 16 Leeds 0532 415890 Sheffield 0742 705565 Hull 0482 495580 Bradford 0274 755066 Email: General support, enquiries internet@demon.net Sales enquiries sales@demon.net Modem and other orders orders@demon.net Accounts accounts@demon.net Please do not mail questions to individual people as a rule as internet@demon.net gets read by the entire support team and so you can benefit from several people's knowledge and experience. In addition, should you mail somebody who is away from the office (holiday etc.) you will not receive a reply until their return. Please note that we cannot accept suuport questions via fax or posted mail. 6. Types of Connection ====================== You may make a SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol) or PPP (Point to Point Protocol) connection with us. Do not worry if these do not mean anything to you. You may download free or shareware software for a vast range of computers from us and we will advise you on the relevant files. If you already have ftp access, say from work, then you may use anonymous ftp from ftp.demon.co.uk. Alternatively the market for TCP/IP packages is growing rapidly and you may use any of these which support PPP and/or SLIP. Every new account is set up as "ASK". This means that as part of your login sequence, you will tell the computer whether you are about to make a PPP or SLIP connection. Thus if you have successfully connected a PC to us making a PPP connection and you wish to set up a Unix box with SLIP, you can do so without any change to your account. 7. The login sequence ===================== The software for PC DOS users, Amiga and some others already handles this for you. If your software doesn't automatically handle the dialling and connecting to the gateway then you will have to setup your own dialler script. The dialling script needs to use 8 bits standard comms - that is 8 bits, no parity and 1 stop bit. The sequence is: wait for ogin: the login: prompt wait for 1 second for our machine to be ready send your nodename (eg. yourmc - not yourmc.demon.co.uk) wait for word: the password prompt send your password wait for ocol: the protocol: prompt send ppp or slip (or, for Suns running pl6, rfc1172) wait for HELLO When waiting for messages such as the above remember that your dialler will be case sensitive. Once you have received the HELLO you should start your ppp or slip connection. The gateway sends you the motd (message of the day) and then sends HELLO. Some diallers buffer the information being received and will not successfully handle a long motd. Therefore we try to restrict this message to 2 or 3 lines. Important announcements are always made in the demon.announce newsgroup. If you are running on an Apple Mac then we advise that you stick to alphabetic and numeric characters for your password as some Mac diallers filter out other characters. Please note that the nodename and password are case sensitive. Once connected you may change your password by telnetting to gate.demon.co.uk and logging in as your nodename. If running on a Sun and using the free "pl6" PPP software downloaded from us, then at the "protocol:" prompt you should send "rfc1172". Other parameters may be sent at the Protocol: prompt including: idle=0 Defeat our idle out time idle=240 Set our idle out time to 240 seconds mru=1500 Set the Maximum receive unit size idle=0,mru=1500,PPP Combine commands If you have communication problems, refer to /pub/doc/Modem.txt for more information. Ring the support line if you are still stuck. 8. The Demon Machines ===================== gate.demon.co.uk 158.152.1.65 London host post.demon.co.uk 158.152.1.72 handles mail dis.demon.co.uk 158.152.1.69 ftp server ftp.demon.co.uk CNAME dis.demon.co.uk newnews.demon.co.uk 158.152.254.254 news server news.demon.co.uk CNAME newnews.demon.co.uk nether.demon.co.uk 158.152.1.71 router disme.demon.co.uk 158.152.1.70 accounts server dismayl.demon.co.uk 158.152.1.76 IRC etc. ns.demon.co.uk 158.152.1.193 a parallel port! hel.demon.co.uk 158.152.5.65 Warrington host clootie.demon.co.uk 158.152.6.65 Edinburgh host styx.demon.co.uk 158.152.1.73 Central London host ragnarok.demon.co.uk 158.152.12.194 Reading host thokk.demon.co.uk 158.152.7.194 Sunderland host tyr.demon.co.uk 158.152.14.194 Yorkshire host 9. Archimedes users =================== The Archimedes software available for download from our guest account is a version of the KA9Q software that a lot of our PC users use. There is documentation supplied with it. We do not have an Archimedes computer in the office but have an active news group of users. This is of use to you only when you are connected and can send and receive news of course! A lot of our users frequent the Arcade BBS and are always willing to answer questions. Arcade is on 081-654 2212. 10. Sundry Connection Information ================================= The following information may already be coded into the software you download from us (e.g. PC DOS users) but in case it is not, or it is out of date: The computer that you connect to is called gate.demon.co.uk and its IP address is 158.152.1.65. News is offered using Network News Transfer Protocol (nntp) on the service news.demon.co.uk, currently a nickname for newnews.demon.co.uk 158.152.254.254. If retrieving files from us using anonymous ftp, please connect to ftp.demon.co.uk and log in as anonymous (or "ftp" if you can't spell anonymous). ftp.demon.co.uk is currently the same as gate but may not always be. Mail is handled by post.demon.co.uk which is 158.152.1.72. We are running a nameserver on gate and you should resolve at our nameserver by IP address: 158.152.1.65. For Unix users this means have a file /etc/resolv.conf containing: domain demon.co.uk nameserver 158.152.1.65 Suns do not resolve by default, they use Yellow Pages (sorry NIS). To make them work on the Internet, you need to rebuild the shared libraries. Easier still, copies of the prebuilt shared libraries are held on ftp.demon.co.uk in /pub/sun. Copy the right one to /usr/lib on your Sun and reboot. Also, under Unix systems, you will need to add a default route. This involves executing the following command after the SLIP or PPP interface is established: route add default 158.152.1.65 1 Don't forget to delete the route before detaching your interface or you may crash your kernel. In addition, this default route should be set up early on in your connection script so that mail, which will try to send and receive as soon as the connection is made, can have a route to follow. A dial in sequence on Unix machines may look like this: "" ATZ OK ATDT0813434848 CONNECT "" ogin:-\d\c-ogin: \dmachine word:- \d\c-word: yourpw otocol:-\d\c-otocol: ppp HELLO If running a Sun without a LAN you may have the following problem: You may get on and route to our gate machine and the rest of the world, but not contact anything else on 158.152.0.0. You will probably have a netmask of 0xffff0000 on your Ethernet interface (which is there by default on a Sun). The fix is either to remove the le0 interface from /etc/rc or to put a netmask of 0xfffffffe on it. 11. Setting up NetManage Chameleon ================================== If using NetManage Chameleon, a commercial product written for DOS Windows 3.x, you need the following in PPP.INI in your NetManage directory: [DEFAULT] SCRIPT=login: $u$r word: $p$r Protocol: PPP,$c$r HELLO $r TYPE=SLIP [SLIP0] SCRIPT=login: $u$r word: $p$r Protocol: PPP,$c$r HELLO $r TYPE=SLIP [PPP0] SCRIPT=login: $u$r word: $p$r Protocol: idle=600,mru=1440,$c$r HELLO $r TYPE=PPP To set up the Interface - Start Custom Under Interface Add a single PPP interface Remove any Ethernet or other LAN interfaces that you might have added in installation (unless you really need them) Under Set-Up Add your own IP Address that you got when setting up your password Leave the Subnet Mask as 255.255.0.0 Host Name is your 4 - 8 character nodename Domain Name is demon.co.uk Port is 19200, 8, n, 1 Hardware Flow control, COMX (19,200 is the DTE speed that your computer talks to your modem at and you may wish to vary this) want another speed. Modem - most of the defaults will work e.g. ATQ0V1F0E0&K3W1s95=47 works with a microlin FX32+ which gives more info during login Dial - increase the time-out to at least 60 seconds and check the start Log so you can see what is happening. Put in the phone number of the nearest PoP. Login Settings Your Demon User Name - The 4-8 character nodename Your Password Startup command - ppp Interface Name - PPP0 Route Entries - None Required BOOTP - leave as 0.0.0.0 UNDER SERVICES Default Gateway - 158.152.5.65 (or another Demon default gateway) Frequent Destinations - only used on LANs to reduce ARP's - so ignore Domain Name Servers - 158.152.5.65 and 158.152.1.193 SNMP - ignore Host Table - any name to address translation that you don't want to depend on the DNS for. SAVE THE FILE as TCPDEMON.CFG and close Custom, saving changes to TCPIP.CFG if asked. Re-open Custom Change the telephone number under dial to the other Pops you might use and save these as new TCPXXXX.CFG files. Then open the config file you use mostly and 'Connect' If you do not get a Log Window (because you are using an older version) Drop Settings Log to see the connect sequence. Chameleon does have a few stability problems with Mail, but logging in to demon is not one of the problems! 12. Yellow Pages ================ If running NIS Yellow Pages you should ensure that /etc/passwd contains an entry for your nodename. ypbind is one of the processes that hold's Sun's Network Information Service (aka Yellow Pages) together. When you are running NIS, you don't have a real /etc/passwd - you have a minimal one with a special marker at the end which says in effect "now include the NIS password file" which is held in /etc/yppasswd on the master NIS server. If you can no longer access the master server (e.g. ypbind stops working) then you only get the minimal entries from the real passwd file. This can mean that sendmail thinks you no longer exist and can bounce your mail. 13. Other information ===================== At any time during your connection you can type finger @post.demon.co.uk to see how many mail messages you have waiting to be downloaded to you. To see the MOTD (Message of the Day) type finger motd@gate. To look up mail and IP information about a host type finger @post.demon.co.uk. The Internet is a large and complex network of networks. As will all complex systems it does not always work perfectly. Parts of the network sometimes fall over, resulting in portions of the world either being unreachable or perhaps only reachable via a more roundabout/slower route. Similarly, email is not an exact science. Though things have improved dramatically during recent years there is still no guarantee that email will reach it's target. Our mail and news gateway machines may sometimes reject your incoming connections. This is often due to peaks in the loading of the machine. Treat such rejections as you would a telephone busy tone. Please contact us if this is a recurring problem so that we may ensure the smooth running of the service. Whilst we strive to provide as full and reliable a service as possible there are occasions when we have to shut down parts of the system either for maintenance or emergency repairs. We try to give ample notice of such service interruptions by mentioning them in the message of the day which is displayed during login and also in the newsgroup demon.announce. Occasionally we have to act quickly to reduce the impact of a particular problem. This means that we may have to ask you to disconnect your session if you are using an affected part of the system. Depending on how urgent the problem is we usually attempt to contact any connected sites to ask them to log off when convenient rather than just killing connections. It isn't practical to make dozens of telephone calls so we use electronic means to attempt to contact each site. If you do not accept/respond to one of ttylink/otalk/ntalk then we may have no choice but to kill your connection. Even if Usenet News is not one of the features of the system that you intend to use regularly, it is in your interest to at least read the demon.announce newsgroup. If you are on a PC then you should additionally read demon.ip.support.pc.announce. There are other groups for other computers and a full list is available on ftp.demon.co.uk:/pub/news/active.zip. These will keep you in touch with aspects of the system that directly affect you. See ftp.demon.co.uk:/pub/doc/Welcome.txt for more general information on aspects of our service and how to find yet more information.