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Date:      Sat, 9 Dec 1995 15:35:06 -0600 (CST)
From:      Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
To:        winter@jurai.net (Matthew N. Dodd)
Cc:        tom@uniserve.com, sreid@edmbbs.iceonline.com, freebsd-isp@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Hardware for ISP / WWW server
Message-ID:  <199512092135.PAA22574@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.91.951209151146.23784D-100000@sasami> from "Matthew N. Dodd" at Dec 9, 95 03:16:05 pm

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> On Sat, 9 Dec 1995, Joe Greco wrote:
> > >   None, that I've seen.  And I run quite a few sub-nets from various 
> > > Portmasters.  In fact, my house is connected by one.
> > Tried running one on a non-class-C subnet?
> 
> Thats a RIP issue more than a Portmaster issue.  Its not their fault they
> use RIP.  :)

So whose fault is it?  :-)  :-)

> > Not a bug, a feature.  The Portmaster reportedly will try to "hold on" to a
> > connection pending a reconnect, but on a busy dial in pool you need to
> > reserve more like 40 addresses minimally.
> 
> Reportedly.  When I start having these problems I'm going to do my
> own dynamic addressing through radius.  

Oh, the pain.  :-/  Basically I've been on the "other side of the glass" a
lot of times as I have seen a lot of people who are exasperated with (X, Y,
Z, combination of, etc.) about the Portmasters.  That is not to say that
they do not fill their intended purpose, but they do seem to me to be the 
VW Bug of terminal servers (everybody has 'em, nobody likes 'em, everybody
has to open the trunk and tinker every once in a while in order to work
around quirks).

> > Guess it depends which Annex..
> 
> There are only about 4 zillion different models.

True  :-)

> > And of course with FreeBSD you can go down to the corner store for spare
> > parts, and you get the source.  What more could you ask for?
> 
> A boxed solution?  I don't know.  Maybe I will sit down and roll a FreeBSD
> terminal server thingy.  Just to see if it would be worth using.  Maybe
> when I get more sleep.

I keep thinking I should do that as well.  What I use here in-house is 
specialized and requires some other services that exist here in-house.  It
would be cool to see a more generalized package...

> > I refuse to be a victim of Livingston propaganda  :-)
> 
> Strange.  I never talked to them.  What are they saying?

I was referring to the "Portmaster can do 115200 on all ports" remark.  I
consider this to be marketing propaganda because a Portmaster doing 115200
in one direction on all ports is creating 11K * 30 (330K) of traffic per
second on an Ethernet, which in the real world is totally impractical.
These are things geeks tell their girlfriends to try to impress them, not
real world useful numbers.  It's like saying that a Fibre Channel SCSI disk 
can do 100MB/sec transfers, when I know damn well that most drives only
transfer data internally at < 80 Mbits/sec, so the bus speed is irrelevant
when looking at a single drive.  Marketing hype.  Maybe sexy marketing hype
to some people, but I prefer real world, cold, cruel, useful, relevant,
hard data when doing product evaluations...

And I'm hardly convinced that FreeBSD is NOT capable of the same feat.  :-)

... Joe

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



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