Telebit modems and news.

[Super user]

Background:

I am running news on a Intel/286 using the SCO binaries - it works well and
I have no complaints.  I downstream the feed to three sites.  Two sites are
Telebit equipped and one site is 2400 baud.  I have two phone lines into the
system - one line is a Hayes <type> 2400 baud modem, the second line has a
Telebit.  I am using the SCO upgraded versions of uucico, and dialTBIT for
the 286.  The O/S version is 286 2.2.3.  The hardware consists of a 27Mhz
(that what they say folks - I think closer to 20Mhz) 286 with 4 megs of
100 nanosecond RAM.  Beyond that nothing fancy - the serial ports are on
one dump card - and I doubt the ports would run faster than 9600 baud.
The incoming news feed goes off smoothly - each day - it comes in
at 2400 baud - they do not have anything faster.

The Problem:

Whenever I attempt to use any spoofing such as the uucp (S111=30) protocal,
with the other site at 255 or with me at 255 and them at 30 - I get alarms
(usually about three) and then the connections goes away - without news
being delievered.  We have tried changing - just about every register comb-
ination in an attempt to fix the problem - but nothing has worked.  The 
connections are made at 9600 baud.  If the spoofing is turned off and the
connection is made at CONNECT/FAST (9600) no problems are encountered -
except for the fact that the transfer rate goes to about 170 bytes per
second.  The few packets of news that do transfer when the CONNECT/FAST/
UUCP connection is made usually go at about 870/880 bytes per second and
I am happy with that (but only a few make it before the alarms begin).

Also I have no problem transferring a straight tar'ed file using the uucp
spoofing - the problem seems to be with compressed news files.  Below is
the message left in mail uucp when the problem occurs:

AERROR - (ret == pk->p_rsize + HDRSIZ) PKXSTART ret 0

I have no idea what the above means - I hope somebody does, however :-).

Both sites have tried compress (S110) on and off, again with no success.

I would greatly appreciate any suggestions - or help with this problem.

Thank you.

$ who am i
$ Terry Cioni, at Xenlink in Calgary, Alberta
  UUCP: calgary!xenlink!terry  Voice: (403)274-4503