Date: Mon, 29 Jan 1996 10:18:05 -0700 From: Scott Halbert <scott@thuntek.net> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Multi-Port Async Cards Message-ID: <2.2.32.19960129171805.00dd2060@thuntek.net>
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At 10:05 AM 1/29/96 -0600, Joe Greco wrote: >I think two at most (32 lines on each?). Some serial solutions would allow >more than that but I don't have firsthand experience with them. Keeping one >(_______) in stock isn't always a great alternative, particularly when the >number of (_______) items is large.. let's keep a Portmaster in stock, a >Cisco router, an extra Sun workstation, etc. Expensive! Startup ISP's in >particular are extremely low margin businesses, and anything that can be >done to help this is something that can promote FreeBSD. The ability to use >FreeBSD for such a wide variety of needs could be a very convincing reason >for an ISP to go with FreeBSD! We are a new FreeBSD based ISP in Albuquerque and have put together a particularly cheap way to do dialin/ppp servers. We have set up a series of small 386 machines each with 4 internal modems. These remote boot off the network and have no disk drives of any kind, just an ethernet card and 4 modems on the bus (usually have a vga card too for diagnostics). So, since you can get 28.8 internal modems from $120 to $180 and usually they are $30 dollars cheaper than externals, and the machine only costs from $200 to $300 (depending on your used sources) the cost per port runs from $170 to $250. I could never get the per port costs of any multiplexer card and external modems to come down to this (maybe it can at huge number of lines), but this is a cheap way to start. You might get what you pay for, but I don't see differences in robustness with other configurations. This way is very modular. I had to patch my sio.c to get it to see my internal modems, but really, it's been working great with 2.1R out of the box. I can't see that its too easy to manage large hunt groups no matter what server configuration you have. I'd like to see some management tools to deal with this (connect to modems and make sure they are properly set up, detect broken modems and busy them out and report them, fish for non-answering lines -- I'm getting out the 'expect' manual). >------------------------------------------------------------------------------- >Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net >Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/342-4847 ---Scott Halbert (thor@thuntek.net) Thunder Network Technologies
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