From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Jan 29 14:16:34 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id OAA09238 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 29 Jan 1996 14:16:34 -0800 (PST) Received: from brasil.moneng.mei.com (brasil.moneng.mei.com [151.186.109.160]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id OAA09198 for ; Mon, 29 Jan 1996 14:16:14 -0800 (PST) Received: (from jgreco@localhost) by brasil.moneng.mei.com (8.7.Beta.1/8.7.Beta.1) id QAA04335; Mon, 29 Jan 1996 16:14:54 -0600 From: Joe Greco Message-Id: <199601292214.QAA04335@brasil.moneng.mei.com> Subject: Re: Multi-Port Async Cards To: scott@thuntek.net (Scott Halbert) Date: Mon, 29 Jan 1996 16:14:53 -0600 (CST) Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960129171805.00dd2060@thuntek.net> from "Scott Halbert" at Jan 29, 96 10:18:05 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] Content-Type: text Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > 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