Multiple profiles

Hi All,

I am running Netscape 7. 02. I recently obtained an account with a second ISP. The setting for the two ISP's are naturally different so I created a second profile to cope with this. I want to be about to dial into one or the other using just the profile. My impression was that the reason profiles exist was to cope with this situation.
After setting up separate profiles I am finding the dial-up connection dialog box appears with whatever I last entered rather than the information that should be associated with a particular profile. This means that I can dial in with the wrong user name and password. Does anyone know if I have missed something here? Or are profiles somewhat less than perfect?
My other problem is that although I am using two ISP's and two profiles I don't really want to maintain two address books and two sets of bookmarks. Is this just a matter of creating a common path and file name for both profiles to use? Has anyone shared address books and book marks across profiles?

Thanks

Cheers

Kerri Northey

 

Netscape 7.02, unlike Communicator or 4.x can have multiple accounts set up, so there is no reason to have multiple profiles. And, as you may have noticed, you use the Account Wizard.
At the last count, I think I have four e-mail POP accounts from four different ISPs, plus AOL and Netscape Webmail, as special IMAP account, and an additional run of the mill IMAP accounts. And, they all work.
So, although I have also many profiles, for experimental reasons, one profile should do the job. I have cable, so it is easy.
Honestly, I have not had dialup for four years, but it should work for you.

 

Thanks for that Westside,

I'm not sure if I understand correctly. I already have several email accounts set up without problem. I only recently upgraded my browser from 4.7 to 7.02 and I was very impressed at how easy it was to set these up. My problem relates to the actual dial up information. It may be that you also set this up within the account wizard but I can't see where.

Under Edit - Preferences - Advanced - Proxies I can set up the proxy information for each ISP the this does get saved with the profile. When I start Netscape it brings up the profile manager and a list of profiles (currently 2). I select a profile and the dail-up-connection dialog box appears. I get a list of dial-up connections - and this is where I seem to be getting a problem. The dial-up connections do not match the profile. For example I can choose the profile for ISP#1 but get a list of connections that includes the setup information for ISP#2. If I choose ISP#2 (usually because I'm not looking at what I'm doing) the connection fails because it has the wrong proxy information, wrong user name and wrong password. What I'm interested in doing is linking these somehow so that I don't have to constantly watch it all the time.

Cheers

Kerri

 

Kerri,
I understand what you want to do, but I would, most likely ,be lost if I was in a similar situation.
I have not had dial-up for nearly four years, and, there is nothing easier than to set up the accounts with cable. And, I use direct connection to the internet.
In my ignorance, I am asking, can you do that? Probably not. Have you tried with NS 4.x?
I will have to ask someone who has dial-up, and is in the process of switching over, but has access to two ISPs, and uses Netscape.
I know someone in that situation, and I will get back to you if I get an answer.

 

Hi Kerri,

A couple of questions for you:
Why do you need a Proxy, and have you tried using the "Direct Connection to the Internet "?

Did you follow this procedure when setting up the two SMTP Servers:

How to add a SMTP mail server:

1. In Netscape 7 Mail & Newsgroups click Edit | Mail & Newsgroups Account Settings.
2. Select Outgoing Server (SMTP) in the Mail & Newsgroups Account Settings window.
3. Click Advanced to open the Advanced Outgoing Server (SMTP) Settings window.
4. Click Add, enter the SMTP mail server name or IP address in the Server Name: field (including other information, if needed) and click OK.
5. Click OK to return to the Mail & Newsgroups Account Settings window.


How to use different SMTP mail servers for my Mail accounts:

1. In Netscape 7 Mail & Newsgroups click Edit | Mail & Newsgroups Account Settings.
2. Select the Account Name to view the Account Settings.
3. In the lower right corner of the Account Settings window click the Advanced button to select the SMTP mail server to use for the account.
4. Click OK to close the Advanced Account Settings window.
5. Click OK to close the Mail & Newsgroups Account Settings window.

You can share Bookmarks, but not Address Books. Here is a guideline for Sharing Bookmarks

Ramona

 

Hi Kerri

Reading this post, you received excellent answers and alot of possible options. BUT.. the real problem is your "dial up ". Not using dialup anymore, never had 2x ISP's while on dialup. I've never traveled this road. Hopefully via the modem/dialup setting you can save "ISP dialup profiles ". You would then select ISP profile and dial in, load Netscape, choose appropiate mail server. Don't know if possible to build shortcuts to multiply ISP dialup profiles? Follow the path and see if it's doable. Don't see an advantage for two Netscape profiles. What you save in not having to change the "mail server ", you give up with tracking email stored in 2 different profiles. Post back... curious dilemma.

 

Dennis,

Good points you made, and reminded me of something that I should have asked Kerri.

Kerri,

Did you clear all your DNS, gateway, and IP settings, in order that Windows will use the settings in your individual connections?

Ramona

 

Follow up

I discussed your plight with my son, who was in a similar situation (almost).
It is a dial-up thing which is not even comprehensible to a cable user. This is what he said

aahhh...excellent question. I've got NetZero on my computer, and
> Karen's will have PeoplePC until it expires. In fact, I had wanted to
> pilot NetZero on my PC using the "free 10 hours" option, and it never
> worked. I wanted to see how good it was...but, as you suggest, two ISP
> setups don't like to play together.

And, as second follow up. NetZero will not play games using Netscape, so it is not that. He was trying dial-up networking.
May be neither one know what we are talking about, but Dennis L. is right

 

Hi Kerri

If your still looking for a way to manage multiple ISP profiles this program may provide a solution.... MultiRAS 1.0 which.... "Allows you to use multiple modems at the same time to access the Internet! It works even if you have to log into multiple ISPs or use different login names for each dialup."
Now I "assume" you could use ONE modem / ISP at a time... Unless you have 2 phone lines/2 modems, you could log in on both and zoooommm.
The new improved MultiRAS 2.1 can be downloaded here. It is a 10KB download, the rest of the code used by MultiRAS are library files already loaded on your machine. The authors email is on the page if you want to chat. Post back if/when you get it working. The site is slow, sometimes does not come up...?

 

A funny thing happened on the way to my password ...

Wow, some excellent suggestions, thank-you everyone.

The problem seems to have fixed itself when I saved my passwords! Something I don't usually do, just from habit. I guess this must have triggered whatever bit of the software tracks the connection between the profiles, usernames and passwords. I guess it's often the little things that can trip us up!

Thank-you for the guidelines on sharing bookmarks and setting up email Ramona. In response to your question the reason I have two ISP's is that I am transferring my connection to a different provider but am retaining a dail-in connection to my previous provider for email and to access thier intranet. The email can of course be collected through the second provider. There was a period of around a month when I had both connections going. The pop server set-up is what my first provider advise is the correct configuration. I assume that this is related to accessing the intranet service ?

My second connection is direct to the internet.

With respect to clearing DNS and IP
settings, I created new dial-up connections so I am assuming that this isn't nessecary?

WestSide, I had to set-up both new dial-in connections and profiles to get it to work to ensure that each ISP was getting the right information. However, from some of the suggestions it looks as though I may be able to alter my set-up sufficiently to do away with the need for separate profiles. I will definitely try this. Thanks for your help with this.

Dennis sounds like an interesting program. Amazing what you can get isn't it?

Thanks everyone

Kerri

 

Hi Kerri

I was hoping / assuming the multiply ISP dialup profiles could be saved within the modem program or windows network configurations. You say they are stored in Netscapes profiles, wow, that's interesting.

 

Hi Dennis,

It may be me being vague with my language.

What I have is a number of dial-up connections set up in Windows 98. I also have two profiles set up in netscape to handle the different configuration for the two ISP's I currently use. My problem was that in the dial-up connection dialog box I was getting the list of dial-up connections but when I choose one from the drop-down list the user name didn't update. Which was just plain irritating.

The problem seemed to fix itself when I saved passwords. Interestingly, it only works for the two dial-up options where I have saved passwords. If I select one that doesn't have a password, it doesn't update.

I hadn't thought about it before - I was assuming that netscape took care of the nexus between profiles and dial-up information but it could just as well be Windows.

Hope this clarifies it a bit.

Cheers

Kerri