While you can connect to the MUSH via telnet, you don't really want to. You'll want to use a client, which provides useful features such as word-wrap, scrollback, logging, and highlighting.
Some popular clients include:
- SimpleMU (Windows)
- MUSHClient (Windows)
- TinyFugue (Linux and other Unix flavors)
- Atlantis (MacOS X)
Dealing with Broadband Timeouts
If you need to periodically send or receive text in order to keep your connection alive (as might be the case if your broadband router automatically drops you after a short period of idle time), please do one of the following:
- If you need to send text, use the IDLE (case-sensitive) command. It won't output anything, and it won't reset your idle time.
- If you need to receive text, use +keepalive minutes[=string] — it will send you a blank line (or the string you specify) at the time interval you specify.
Because neither of these options resets your idle time, this is much friendlier to people trying to figure out who's active and who's idle. Also, this stops individuals from cluttering up the wait queue with personal unidlers.
We have an eight-hour idle timeout on the game, so you don't really need to worry about being timed out by the game if you're away for a while.
Kynan's Suggestion for Dealing with Poor Connections
Use at your own risk…
Kynan has written a suggestion that he believes works on WinXP (he's not sure if it works on Win2K or Vista, that he thinks will help those with poor connectivity and constant loss of connection to the MUSH. He says:
The technical reason is that WinXP uses a retransmit count, rather than an interval, on TCP connections (which is how you communicate to the MUSH). It turns out that if you lose a connection for about 16 secs (from my testing), WinXP thinks the connection is dead. You can increase this by changing a parameter, but it requrires you to edit the registry using regedit (it's best if you have passing familiarity with this before trying the following, or have someone who does do it).
Start regedit (using Start=>Run…) and expand the keys (in the left pane) to get to the one named:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
The value you want to edit is named TcpMaxDataRetransmissions. You may have to create that by highlighting the Parameters key in the left pane, using Edit=>New=>DWORD Value, and typing the name into the right pane to rename it from the temporary name. Then, highlight TcpMaxDataRetransmissions and right click, selecting the Modify menu option. I use a value of 10 Decimal. After closing regedit, I believe a reboot would be necessary.
With someone's help, I created a file at http://www.lyrsa.org/Kynan/tcp.reg that should, once you download and save it as a file, do the trick, either by double-clicking on it, or Using File=>Import in regedit.
