Frequently Asked Questions
Q. Will you forward my mail to me? If I wish, temporarily, to forward mail to my web-based e-mail address for traveling, is that practical? A.L A Bridge will forward mail on a permanent or semi-permanent basis. We recommend using one of the many free services that let's you check your POP mail account from a web interface. Once such service is found at http://www.ThatWeb.com/ which will allow you to check your L A Bridge account from the web without forwarding mail. Q. My email box can only hold up to 2Mb. Can I increase this? A. We will gladly change the size of your box permanently. We just need to control the overall utilization of the email server so that when a 9Mb movie of the Ally McBeal dancing baby gets flooded to all mailboxes our server doesn't wedge. We don't recommend moving large files this way (see next). Q. I'm expecting a large (approx. 15 MB) file to be emailed to me, but the sender keeps getting a message that my mailbox is full. I'm don't have any messages on the L A Bridge POP server, so why might he be getting this message? Is there a size limitation on my email account? If so, what is it? A.Yes. It's 2Mb. In our opinion, 15Mb files should be moved via FTP or some type of direct connection (PCAnywhere, Timbuktu). An even better method is to use the free Internet hard-disk services like Apple's iDisk or XDrive. If you absolutely need this we can temporarily increase your mailbox size. Let us know. Q. I have most recently had an Internet connection via Earthlink. For some reason when I open Eudora Pro with my L A Bridge DSL connection it downloads all my incoming Earthlink e-mail. (How does it do that?) The problem is that I cannot reply to any of it. A.You need to put smtp.LBridge.com in the SMTP server box setting found in the preferences area of your software. Please note the spelling of SMTP. Many people reverse the Ps and the Ts. It stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. This will fix your problem. Q. Is there a maximum limit for e-mail transfer? A. No, provided it's not unsolicited mail (UCE). Q. Your pricing info page says DSL accounts come with 1 email address or mail spooling. Could you explain how mail spooling works? Is this like domain forward? A.Mail spooling means L A Bridge configures a backup mail server for customers who run their own mail servers. If the customer mail server is restarting or goes down for any reason, we spool the mail until that server comes back up. Q. When we're connected to TCP/IP via the Webramp (DSL router) DHCP at our office, I assume each Eudora client will log on and pick up mail by virtue of a different username and password. A. This is correct, each computer on the Local Area Network (LAN) can configure independent e-mail settings. Q. What about dial-up access? Our office in another city is still on POTS via 56k modem so will they be able to dial up and grab e mail? A. Yes, as long as his email settings are correct. The correct settings for LA Bridge Mail are: Incoming mail: pop.labridge.com Outgoing mail: smtp.labridge.com Q. If I'm connected to AOL, will I be able to grab my L A Bridge mail by launching Eudora and using the TCP provided by my AOL link? A. Yes, as long you have an active connection on the Internet. And your incoming mail server is set for pop.labridge.com. Q. What if I'm out of town at a hotel? Is there toll-free dial-up access to get in (even if surcharge applies)? A. We do not have a toll free number to access your email. However, if you are travelling quite a bit, you may be interested in iPass. This is a service that LA Bridge offers that allows people to dial into local ISP's around the world and access the Internet and their LA Bridge e-mail account. For more information on iPass, please see the LA Bridge website at: http://www.labridge.com/ Q. I am unable to send any e mail; every single attempt is turned down by the L A Bridge server. Is there anyway that you can fix this problem ? A.
The mail server records the IP address which you just checked mail from and recognizes you as a valid L A Bridge customer. It allows you to send mail for the next 10 minutes. NewsQ. What's your news feed like (any chance I can get my hands on the actual list of groups you currently carry)? A.It's a complete news feed. We buy it from a commercial carrier so it is a very thorough list.
iPassQ. I noticed you have flat-rate nationwide/worldwide access dialup plans in. Any chance you can throw one of those accounts in with the DSL package for nominal fee? A.No. We can not negotiate with those plans since the markup is very low. We buy our international pops from PSI. Q. I am leaving town for work. Will be in NYC for a couple weeks. How do I get this Dial Wizard and what is my access number, etc.? A. There are three steps:
Note that DSL customers login name is actually: DSL<yourlogin> and it is case-sensitive. The DSL in your name allows us to differentiate DSL customers who are on a 20-hour program from our standard flat-rate PPP users. Q. When I try to download the iPass software this is what I get. Error
Message: Problem
Detail: A. Use your right mouse button to click on the link and select "Save this file to disk". When it prompts you select "as source". DSLQ. With your Silver 384/384 plan, what is the realistic speed I should expect? A. The download speeds range between 12K/sec and 40K/sec. The average is about 32K/sec on extended downloads. A 100Mb+ file usually takes less than an hour.
Q. What do I need for DSL installation? A. Checklist for DSL installation: Make sure you have an ethernet card installed in your computer before your installation due date. 3COM ethernet adapters can be purchased at most computer stores for around $50. You may want to print the DSL installation instructions found in the 'Customer Support' section of the L A Bridge website. When you complete the installation you will need to call L A Bridge to have the circuit turned up. This usually takes less than five minutes to activate. Q. If my DSL line is plugged into a hub can I use either computer for surfing the net? A. Yes. Q. I understand that I am logged onto the net 24/7 with a DSL connection so I am assuming all I have to do is open a web browser on whichever computer I want to use and go from there. Is this correct? A. Yes. Q. One of my friends tells me that I could use one of my computers as a server and leave it on 24/7 and host my own web site from my own computer using my DSL connection. Is this correct? A. Yes. This costs an additional $20/month for BronzePlus, Bronze Plus Enhanced and Silver customers, an additional $40 for Gold customers, and is not recommended on the Bronze Plus or Bronze Plus Enhanced service because the upload speed is set at just 128kbps. If you want to host a password protected site, it can be done for no additional charge. Q. I am leaving town for work. Will be in NYC for a couple weeks. How do I get this Dial Wizard and what is my access number, etc.? A.
Note that your login name is actually: DSLusername and it is case-sensitive. The DSL before your username allows us to differentiate DSL customers who are on a 20-hour program from our standard flat-rate PPP users. Q. How about cable? A. My experience with Century Cable (or "Next Century Cable" as I have heard them called), now Adelphia has never been good. I wouldn't trust them with my Internet connection, personally. If the sound periodically drops out of television shows and digital artifacts plague the Sundance Channel it makes me wonder what frustrations will arise when they try to move into the Internet access field. I think the editor of Boardwatch summed it up pretty well in his January editorial where he said: "Right now there is about the same price increase above dial-up for DSL, and DSL has competitive advantages. Typically cable TV is a shared communications bus, using a 27-Mbps common forward data path and a 768 Kbps common return path. Cable's shared system is a disadvantage. A single client without neighborhood competition for bandwidth uses the DSL line." ...from an article titled "Sofa Spuds Clog the Web" available at: http://boardwatch.internet.com/mag/99/jan/bwm1pg4.html Q. I am still getting Charged for Silver DSL, when I have Bronze Plus, and have had it for 4 months. I need L A Bridge to credit my account for the incorrect billing. I have asked Verizon to get the date which you downgraded. A. Typically, L A Bridge needs to be the ones issuing these changes so that we can properly charge you. We have you set at Silver on this end. We will be glad to credit $20/month to your account for those months which you were at the lower service level. The Bronze Plus service on the circuit which you connect to is $49.95 and is considered our business-grade DSL. Q. What level tier provider is L A Bridge? A. We are not a backbone provider so that question is not applicable. I don't know of any backbone providers that supply DSL to end-users. Tier one means that a backbone provider has routers at both MAE-West and MAE-East and has arranged peering agreements with other backbone providers. Tier two means they have routers at MAE-West or MAE-East. Tier 3 means they don't peer at either of those. Q. Will I get one bill from L A Bridge or one bill from Verizon and another >from L A Bridge? A. The second is true, you are billed by LA Bridge for our portion of the service and the phone company's portion is billed on your phone bill. This allows you to contact them directly in the event you have difficulty with your service. They don't like this too well and want to make you call your ISP to issue a trouble ticket. L A Bridge does not wish to impose this situation on our customers. Q. How soon can the service be activated? A.
Usually within 10 workdays in Pac Bell territory and within 20 calendar
days at the most in Verizon territory. A. Once you have confirmed that you want to move ahead (with Verizon) it takes at the most 10 work days for you to receive the modem with the self installkit through the mail. DSL Pricing Q. I currently use your ISP services for my Silver DSL package. You bill me 69.99 every month. I found out that this is a very high price and most of your competitors charge $50. A.In
general, L A Bridge is probably not the cheapest provider out there.
Our service is $10 more per month and we think it is worth that for
a few simple reasons:
In
summary, L A Bridge competes with other Internet companies based on it's superior
service and not on price. We may loose a few customers because of this. Since
we do compete on service our customers generally get disproportionately excellent
performance and reliability compared to the small amount extra which they pay.
Please take this into consideration when you decide. Customer ServiceQ. Can LA Bridge come out and set up my computers so that they all work on a LAN? A. Actually, LA Bridge is not in the business of computer consulting, but we can refer you to some great network integrator consultants and to consultants in other areas as well. SpeedsQ. My DSL connection is 768kbps but I have only been averaging 70kbytes/sec with occasional bursts in the 256kbytes neighborhood. Am I getting the bandwidth I am paying for? A. I think we might be confusing bits with bytes here. Just to help clear up your analysis above: There are 8 bits in a byte. 768Kbits divided by 8 = 96. 96K is the theoretical max you could get on a 768K bits line and is commonly referred to as "line speed". For comparison, a 128Kbits ISDN line produces 12Kbytes/sec downloads. Your line is 6 times faster than the speed of an ISDN line. 12K multiplied by 6 = 72K. 72Kbytes/sec is the typical transfer speed of a line like yours in good condition. Of course, no ISP can guarantee you will get that kind of performance from anywhere on the Internet since no ISP owns the entire Internet. I think the 256K bursts you were seeing were a result of the software not having sufficient time to average how much data was coming through the interface. Q. I have been getting slow response from the system. I have done numerous pings and often get a least one time out and losses. Please let me if there is anything I can do. A.You can ask Verizon to check the attenuation on your line. I think -300dB is normal but anything higher (-60dB) can cause problems and may require rewiring. The Verizon phone number for DSL support is 888.391.1234. Q. I connect fine through the DSL link, however, the speed at which pages load and files d/l seems to be the same as with the modem. For instance, downloads are consistently (different times/different sources) only getting around 5 kbps... and this is not much better than the 56k. And a typical ping to labridge.com (1 hop for me) is around 48ms, with 3 out of four timing out. Trace route produces the same responses. A. Call Verizon at 888.391.1234 and let them know the information you indicated above. 40ms ping times are normal. Time-outs are very abnormal. See if you can reproduce this at all hours of the day or whether this is just during peak times. Q. I downloaded a test file over my Bronze DSL line and the speed was 19-25KB/s, Is this right? A. That indicates a pretty solid 256K connection. For perspective, 128K ISDN connections usually yield 12K/sec. 256K yields 24K/sec. You are achieving maximum speed. The internet is somewhat slower because of routing and packet loss. Q. Am I correct in understanding that at least _two_ of these sites need to be using L.A. Bridge ADSL in order for us to get this quasi-VPN started? A. Yes. To keep traffic off the Internet all three sites would need to be connected to our network. Will this setup allow the two L.A. Bridge user sites to share files and 'talk' to each other as well? Would we be able to have the third site (as well as various single-computer home sites) join in, and if so, will they be able to 'talk' to each other and share files? The two home sites would be able to communicate effortlessly with the business site. However, the two home sites would not be able to do direct connections to each other like sharing files or remote control. They would, ofcourse, be able to send mail, ICQ, etc. And to do direct connections and share files with the business site Q. What is to cost of the VPN service and setup? A. The VPN service is free on our side. The set up costs on your internal network will depend on the level of expertise of your computer department there. If necessary we can have on-site consulting available to you through several different options. Our staff people are sometimes available for this level of consulting. We also work with several "network integrators" who can be of long term assistance. Web Hosting, Virtual Hosting, Logs and FTPQ. Should I name all pages w/ A.html extension, or is .htm OK? A. Either is fine. Q. By setting the ftp client to log on as myUserName the files transfer between my local machine and your web server where they will then appear on the internet as "myDomain.com". The only directory information I get from the L A Bridge machine in the ftp client directory window is "/", but as long as I'm logged on correctly that's the myDomain.com root directory. Is that right? A. You are 100% correct. Q. Are there any rules I should know about for URL naming? Case sensitive? A. Our web server is not case sensitive. Most are though. Q. Are there any forbidden characters? A. Use only alpha-numerics, underscores and hyphens ( "_" and "-") Q. How do I view my website logs? A. You can get at your logs by changing directories to "stats" from your home directory. Download the login.log file and use a stats program to analyze it. There is a free stats program that works on all platforms called "Analog" that I recommend. You can download it from http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~sret1/analog/ There is also an overall hit report demo at: http://members.LABridge.com/sample-stats/ Note that Analog will give you much more detailed stats than the ones above. Please try *NOT* to download your ".log" file between the hours of Midnight and 5:00 A.m. This is the time when the log is created and it is very possible that you could corrupt your log file on our system. Q. What is my web address - mydomain.com? Or what? A. http://home.LABridge.com/~yourusername/ - Note that this is only for the free member website. Commercial webhosting account addresses are yourdomain.com or .net, .org. Anyway you decided to name it when you first registered it.
ConsultingQ. How is it possible, if your crack team is so good, that it could take so many hours to implement a simple database? I have done all the work so far for less than one thousand. I know very good doctors that don't charge 125/hr. A. The hourly rate for database programming is $75. Preconsultation is billed at $125 and usually takes an hour or two. We only work with the best people in town. Our client base speaks for itself. L A Bridge designers are professional and have many projects in the works. Database setup is a non-trivial process. We may not be the cheapest in town but our product is good and we are worth the cost.
Q. An issue which is becoming crucial is our inability to ping across your router. We can't monitor our machine being up because of this. Can you allow ping packets through to our machine? A. No. This setting is network-wide and saves us from the danger of smurf and other denial of service attacks. We use traceroute to do roughly the same tests as ping.
Q. Hi- We've been using a Webramp 700S successfully for about 3 months now. Recently one of our computers began to fail to acquire an internet connection, and we've been unable to figure out why? The unit has a 5-user license and we have only 3 or 4 nodes at most. We have it set to serve up DHCP locally, with a 5-address range. The one computer that keeps giving us problems is a PowerComputing Power Tower 225 running Mac O/S 8.5 with its TCP set for "ethernet" and "DHCP" and the advanced user mode set to search the domain LABridge.com (our ISP, same as the other machines that do work). The Webramp address (to the outside world) is 192.168.169.1, and our internal range is 192.168.169.2 through .6 (255.255.255.0 subnet mask). The machines that work OK are grabbing leases for 192.168.169.4 and 192.168.169.5. The "problem" machine gives us a message whenever we try to Launch Netscape 4.6.1 (just reinstalled as a precaution) that the machine with the physical address (.....) is trying to use a TCP/IP address that's already in use on this network. We reboot and we get a different supposed TCP/IP address each time. Some have been: 169.254.60.53, 169.254.134.164, 196.254.95.87. And the Netscape connection fails and no TCP/IP address is assigned to the computer. We have replaced it's TCP/IP preferences files, its DNS server file from the system folder, its TCP/IP control panel, the OpenTransport libraries... just about everything we could think of. We've reset the webramp a couple of times. No improvement. We have correct internal communication through the Bay Networks switch between this computer and the others, and we have internet access through the Webramp 700S, Fujitsu Orckit DSL modem and BayNet switch from the other computers, but nothing from the Power Tower. It had worked a week or two ago. Any suggestions about what to do to find and fix the problem? A. There is a report in which you can find out which IP address/mac address have a license. This info is available at the end of the Tech Support Report (Tools:Diagnostic). If you have servers that frequently access the internet, then they will probably have a license. To make sure designated computers don't receive a license at all, give them a static IP address with no gateway. As for the PowerComputing machine, it is a common problem for the Mac to grab an unauthorized IP address. This is a common problem under NT DHCP environment. You should just give the MAC a static IP address. Hope this helps. Q. I'm having problems with the Webramp and the Orckit modems. A. There is a beta update for the webramp code available on our ftp site: The revised code is available at ftp://anonymous@ftp.LABridge.com/ ...and it's called wr_m0e_331.bin This fixes some known bugs that were associated with the Orckit modems. Those bugs would not cause you any problems but the code is there if you want to update it to the latest anyway.
Problems Connecting Via Dial-upHere are some of the most frequent login problems:
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L A Bridge Internet & DSL
P.O. Box 1001, Pollock Pines, CA 95726
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