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MLS 2.8.2 Autodetect Works Much Better

Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 10:47 am
by aebrown
In the MLS 2.8.2 Release Notes, there is a little note (which wasn't there in the MLS 2.8.2b1 Release Notes), that says that the Auto-detect feature has been improved. For those of you who don't know about this, the feature is intended to be used in buildings that have broadband Internet connections. MLS allows you to connect via Dial-Up, Internet, or Auto-detect. When you select Auto-detect, if the broadband connection is available, MLS will use it, but if it is not available, MLS will use the dial-up to do a Send/Receive.

In my stake center, we have a broadband connection through the CCN in the FHC. Unfortunately, the DSL modem is a bit flaky, and so the connection goes down intermittently, roughly once every week or two. So I was thinking the Auto-detect would be ideal, so that if a ward was trying to do an MLS Send/Receive, but the FHC internet connection was down, they could still do a dial-up connection.

However, prior to MLS 2.8.2, the Auto-detect didn't work. It would never detect the presence of an Internet connection, so it would always do dial-up. So for the stake office, I set MLS to always use the Internet connection; for the wards in our building, I left them at dial-up, as I didn't want to deal with the support headaches at odd hours when they couldn't connect to the Internet, and didn't have MLS administrator privileges to change the connection method (and couldn't get into the FHC to reset the DSL connection).

But with MLS 2.8.2, the Auto-detect works great. Now I can set everyone to Auto-detect, and it will be much faster for the wards, and we'll all have the dial-up as backup if necessary. Hooray!

Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 9:51 am
by jdlessley
I know it is difficult to get people to monitor their connection when they are focused on other duties at the time of a send/receive. But it would be nice to know if the auto-detect setting really works. Would you post to this thread if the auto-detect actually works?

We have a similar situation in our building where the power grid goes down on a regular basis and causes the modem to go off line and not reset. I do not want to respond at all hours to reset the connection either. Until I can get the FHC director and the stake president to release funds to buy an UPS to prevent this problem I do not want to set MLS to auto-detect.

Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 11:33 am
by aebrown
jdlessley wrote:We have a similar situation in our building where the power grid goes down on a regular basis and causes the modem to go off line and not reset. I do not want to respond at all hours to reset the connection either. Until I can get the FHC director and the stake president to release funds to buy an UPS to prevent this problem I do not want to set MLS to auto-detect.

I don't quite understand why you would not want MLS to auto-detect. The auto-detect setting seems perfect for the situation where the FHC Internet connection may not be reliable. I would think you would want auto-detect. If the Internet connection were perfectly reliable, you could set MLS to use the Ineternet connection setting and you would have no problem.

But because it is unreliable, you should use auto-detect, particularly now that it works well (at least from my experience). It's not hard to test -- I would recommend that you test it in your particular situation to see if indeed it works for you as well as it does for me.

Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 5:56 pm
by jdlessley
Alan_Brown wrote:I don't quite understand why you would not want MLS to auto-detect.
Prior to MLS 8.2 the auto-detect was buggy and not a recommended setting. I would like to set MLS to auto-detect only if the bugs have been worked out. If auto-detect still has bugs then I do not want to have to respond to calls at all hours with complaints that they cannot get a connection to Church headquarters.

I just want to make sure what they say is fixed is in fact fixed before using that setting.

Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 10:15 pm
by childsdj
While there is no guarantee that it is working perfectly, the initial feedback from most users is that it is much better and quicker at detecting a connection.:)

Posted: Sun May 18, 2008 9:30 pm
by lajackson
MLS 2.8.2 seems to handle auto-connect well. We have tested it with various combinations of an unplugged phone line and an unplugged wireless adapter. It has always returned to the wireless connection, when available, and only used the phone line when wireless did not connect.

We did find that MLS does not know why the wireless does not connect sometimes, and will use the phone line until the wireless is fixed by other methods. But it always checks wireless first, then phone. We like it.

Posted: Sun May 18, 2008 11:17 pm
by jdlessley
Great! And thanks. We will now use that setting.