The Lulu Problem Solved
A couple of days ago, I finally figured out what was preventing me from completing an order on lulu.com-a site for publishing ebooks and print-on-demand books that I consider extremely promising. I mentioned this problem in my July 8, 2006 entry, and I was pretty much stymied until the same problem came up on another ecommerce site. This one, however, had good tech support people on staff, and according to them a fair number of people were having the problem.
The problem is simple to state but not easy to explain: The default packet size used by most Ethernet adapters is 1500 bytes, and this is too large for some secure servers configured in certain ways. The solution is to reduce the default Ethernet packet size (called the MTU) on your network adapter to 1400 bytes.
My friend and fellow SF workshopper Chris Gerrib (a sysadmin of long tenure, and Lulu author of The Mars Run) posted an excellent explanation of the problem, which I must warn you is mighty deep geek stuff. The short form is this: If you're working in a secure ecommerce site and the site keeps timing out on you, download a short utility called DRTCP.exe from here and run it. (There's no installation involved. Just execute the .exe.) Select your Ethernet adapter from the drop-down list. Change the MTU value in the lower right corner to 1400. Save. Exit. Reboot. That worked for one ecommerce site, and when I tried Lulu again after changing the MTU value, Lulu worked again as well.
So I finally managed to buy Chris' novel, which I will review here as soon as I finish it. Now that I can reliably access Lulu, I can see about posting a book on it. The book is called The New Reformation. All I need is a cover. Working on it. Gakkh. All I need is another four or five hours in a day.