Have you ever needed your mobile phone to connect to the Internet?

During a life with computers, you sometimes see very strange things - such as this:

I have a little server at home that connects to the Internet via ISDN, and all other PCs in the network get their Internet connection through this server, which was running SuSE Linux 9.0. Everything worked absolutely fine.

Last weekend, I re-installed this server and updated to SuSE Linux 10.0. I set up the hardware settings in the same way as with SuSE 9.0 and generally, it worked again - but not always. Sometimes, I couldn't connect to the Internet anymore (while sometimes, it still works), but I found out a funny solution how to work around this problem.

I have also set up a fax server with capisuite. So if I call the fax (e. g. with my mobile phone), I can connect again right afterwards. I don't know why, but it works.

Of course, this solution wouldn't be very satisfying for the long term. But xDSL is already ordered and so, one of the next days I should be able to through ISDN over board to get a 32 x faster Internet connection without any transfer limits :-). I'm pretty excited about this!

This will also give me a chance to do things that I didn't need to think about so far. For example, there are many great live web seminars from MySQL. ISDN would be too slow to watch them, but this will soon be no problem anymore. And there are many other great things that I can start to do (like downloading and testing different Linux distributions), that have been impossible or at least extremely slow.