Demon Internet Ltd ================== Gateway House 322 Regents Park Road Finchley, London, N3 2QQ 0181-371 1234 (Sales - London) 0131-552 0344 (Sales - Edinburgh) 0181-371 1010 (HelpLine) 0181-371 1150 (Fax) 0181-371 1000 (Switchboard) email internet@demon.net DEMON.TXT - GENERAL INFORMATION ON DEMON AND ON MAKING A CONNECTION. Last updated 24th May 1995 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 ftp.demon.co.uk:/pub/doc/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 node, i.e. "yourmc". You can have unlimited mail address at the name e.g.: Examples: mark@yourmc.demon.co.uk john@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 ftp.demon.co.uk:/pub/doc/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 April 1995 we have 30,000 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 Sun Unix machines centred around our Network Operation Centre in Finchley. Connected via Ethernet, as well as various routers, are the news server (news.demon.co.uk), post servers post.demon.co.uk and punt.demon.co.uk, IRC servers irc.demon.co.uk, WWW server www.demon.co.uk and many more. ftp.demon.co.uk is another Sun with 9Gb of disk space 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 leased lines to the USA and in February 1995 have placed a T1 1.55Mbs link there as well as a permanent backup link. This makes us a totally independent Internet Service Provider. We peer with the other independent UK providers BT, EUNet, JANET and PIPEX via our wideband 2Mb line to the London Internet Neutral Exchange (LINX). We have over 900 dial up lines operating in racks of US Robotics V32bis and V.32terbo modems on all digital exchanges which are currently being upgraded to the V34 standard. In addition we have a number of dedicated phone lines for our network customers, private staff numbers etc. We have many 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 0171 area. Further lines and PoPs are continuously being added. 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 15% 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: London Office number (Sales) 0181-371 1234 Edinburgh office number (Sales) 0131-552 0344 London Switchboard 0181-371 1000 Help Line 0181-371 1010 Help line hours and details are available in /pub/doc/Welcome.txt Fax 0181-371 1150 Dial up modem lines: ==================== Traditional (tPoPs): o London 0181-343 4848 o Cambridge 01223 576010 Saffron Walden 01799 506010 o Edinburgh 0131-552 8883 o Isle of Wight 01983 523306 (Local to Portsmouth and Southampton) o Yorkshire PoP: Bradford 01274 755066 Virtual (vPoPs): o London 0181 338 4848 o Birmingham 0121 275 4848 o Bristol 0117 981 4848 o Cardiff 01222 27 4848 o Coventry 01203 28 4848 o Gloucester 01452 35 4848 o Leeds 0113 298 4848 o Leicester 0116 290 4848 o Liverpool 0151 210 4848 o Luton 01582 64 4848 o Manchester 0161 385 4848 o Newcastle 0191 247 4848 o Nottingham 0115 954 4848 o Preston 01772 48 4848 o Reading 01734 28 4848 o Sheffield 0114 238 4848 o Wolverhampton 01902 46 4848 You may use any PoP at any time. Virtual PoPs may provide you with improved access and will replace the traditional PoPs in time. You need not be concerned with the difference between the two types. More lines Email: General support, enquiries internet@demon.net Sales enquiries sales@demon.net Modem and other orders orders@demon.net Accounts accounts@demon.net Mail Domains and Routing hostmaster@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 support 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 obtain 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 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 password.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 ===================== These are constantly changing and you are advised to use DNS (Domain Name Service) to resolve names into IP addresses whereever possible. All end with .demon.co.uk e.g. gate.demon.co.uk gate 158.152.1.65 London host hinge 158.152.1.82 Another London host post 158.152.1.72 handles mail punt 158.152.1.73 secondary mail server disabuse 158.152.1.44 ftp server ftp CNAME disabuse (same machine as disabuse) newnews 158.152.254.254 news server news CNAME newnews (same machine as newnews) nether 158.152.1.71 router wither 158.152.1.92 router twain 158.152.1.85 router ermin 158.152.1.98 router trude 158.152.1.99 router cow 158.152.1.100 Centre of the World pickup 158.152.1.198 router disme 158.152.1.70 accounts server dismayl 158.152.1.76 IRC and Guest account server www 193.195.1.1 World Wide Web server ns 158.152.1.193 a nameserver, use for DNS anubis 158.152.251.194 Cambridge host clootie 158.152.6.194 Edinburgh host ragnarok 158.152.12.194 Reading host tyr 158.152.14.194 Yorkshire host hades 158.152.250.194 Isle of Wight host If connecting to a virtual PoP (vPoP) and if you need to know the IP address at the end of the link, use demon-du.demon.co.uk which is 158.152.1.222 which is the same regardless of which vPoP you connect to. 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 have an Archimedes computer in the office and one of our support people, Dave Williams, specialises in it. There is 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 0181-654 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 computers that you connect to can be anyone of hinge.demon.co.uk, stile.demon.co.uk and i.demon.co.uk if dialling in on a tPoP number or a.demon.co.uk through to f.demon.co.uk if dialling via a vPoP number. 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, punt.demon.co.uk and punt2.demon.co.uk which currently have IP addresses 158.152.1.72, 158.152.1.73 and 158.152.1.74 respectively. We are running nameservers on ns and on gate and you try and use both if possible. This means that if either nameserver is non-functional, your computer should still be able to resolve addresses off the other. For Unix users this means have a file /etc/resolv.conf containing: domain demon.co.uk nameserver 158.152.1.193 It is recommended that you add in a further line in this file: 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 158.152.1.222 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 ATDT01813434848 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. If you have a local area network and you are using a Standard Dial- Up account then remember that we will only route to the one IP address connected to us and that will be one out of our Class B. IP addresses are assigned to interfaces and not computers so you may have a different IP address on your network card to the one on your serial interface. If you are having problems then netstat -i on the remote machines will show the same network on the ethernet interface as on the point to point link. Thus the OS will add, by default, a route to the whole Class C (or B) network via theethernet. If the Ethernet is not in use, disable it. If it is, make sure it is on a different network from the PPP interface. If necessary, make it a different network with the netmask on en0. 11. Setting up NetManage Chameleon ================================== A complete document on setting this package up is available on ftp.demon.co.uk:/pub/doc/general/chamel.txt 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 see important information on the status of any of our services type finger status@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 with all complex systems it does not always work perfectly. Parts of the network sometimes fail for various reasons 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. Messages for this newsgroup are also available on e-mail. You can obtain this service by e-mailing a request to join the demon.announce mailing list to internet@demon.net. 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. A full list of demon.* newsgroups are held in ftp.demon.co.uk:/pub/doc/Welcome.txt. 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. --------------------------- End of Document ----------------------------