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Date:      Mon, 29 Jan 1996 16:14:53 -0600 (CST)
From:      Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
To:        scott@thuntek.net (Scott Halbert)
Cc:        hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Multi-Port Async Cards
Message-ID:  <199601292214.QAA04335@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960129171805.00dd2060@thuntek.net> from "Scott Halbert" at Jan 29, 96 10:18:05 am

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> 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).

Oh now THAT is disgustingly economical!!  I applaud your ingenuity.  I ran a
diskless terminal server for a while myself, thought I was the only wierdo
who would think to do something that odd...  :-)

> 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).

I've the start of a program that simply performs a mass initialization on a
bunch of modems, it can handle different types and is essentially a trivial
"send/expect" thing.  If this is of general interest, let me know.

Setting up 4 lines at a time might be a tad painful  :-)  and I tend to like
external modems anyways.  Nevertheless, keep up the creative solutions.
;-)

... Joe

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Greco - Systems Administrator			      jgreco@ns.sol.net
Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI			   414/342-4847



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