Date: Mon, 29 Jan 1996 20:14:14 -0700 From: Scott Halbert <thor@thuntek.net> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Multi-Port Async Cards Message-ID: <199601300314.UAA00661@srv1.thuntek.net>
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At 04:55 PM 1/29/96 -0800, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: >> 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 agree - I was kind of impressed when I read this. What's that make >a 4 modem increment cost, about $1500 all in? I don't know what kind >of modem cards are being used here so that's just a WAG. I've never >purchased a terminal mux, either, so I don't even know if this would >be competitive? Do you have these guys set up to advertise the modems >at some IP port range as well for outgoing stuff, or is that purely >incoming? You could do some interesting resource pooling with a few >cooperating daemons.. Hmmmm... [stares off into space for awhile :-] > > Jordan I've recently found some 28.8s for $120, so really, my last server only cost me about $800 (I had a used '386 I got for $200). I had to use a $100 3com 3c509 type card as I have yet to get boot proms to work on the ne2000 compat cards I have. I'm not sure I'm burning the right sized prom for it. They seem to run adequately fast. Of course 4 28.8s is not too fast--maybe 128k--slower than a single speed cdrom, and seldom is there simultaneous hits on all 4. Most of my clients are web browsing. I've assigned IP address in blocks of 10: 1 for the pc server and 2 each for the 4 ppp ports. At this point they are entirely incoming. I also save by getting incoming only commercial measured service lines. I have hard proxy arp's in the rc.local to avoid problems with auto proxy-arps (I'm using user ppp). I did build a little 386 based router with 1 internal that dialed out (one of my dedicated 28.8 customers). It was serving a different subnet and so had just a fixed address. I can see your point about a shared dialout resource pool and how to do the IP addresses (and how to advertise the dynamic arps or route paths). It'd be quite a chore. One daemon that I was interested was one that communicated who was logged in so that the same user could not log in twice anywhere. Similarly, I'm interested in some daemons that could assist in modem health. I've got to get tcl expect running and need to write some scripts to do this. ---Scott Halbert Thunder Network Technologies
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