by I operate an ISP in Toronto, Canada.
We currently support approx. 1400 subscribers, all of whom utilize the Pipeline
Internaut client/server software as their navigation tool;
However, we would like to offer traditional Slip/PPP as an option to our Mac
users, many of whom are disappointed by the weak implementation of Internaut for
mac.
I am currently using Digiboard portserver 16 port Terminal servers, which do 8-
bit clean 'virtual ttys' as opposed to pttys.
The server side of the equation is that the client doesn't need to do any IP
transfers at all; all requests are sent out via the server, and returned to the
server, and then streamed out to the client cooked. (The server even does all
the HTML decoding for WWW browsing!)
Therefore, we have a limit of approx. 64 users/processor on a Sparc20 at 60MHz
with any quantity of memory >64 Megs. (We've doubled that quantity of ram, but
it doesn't signifigantly improve performance(!))
Does anyone know of a hack to allow us to dynamically assign IP#s to inbound PPP
sessions? We would like to allow users the option of using PPP if they need to,
and we are not prepared to buy new terminal servers at this time.
Does anyone have experience with Morningstar PPP? How heavy a load it is on the
processor? (ie, could we simply run that, and count it as about the same load,
roughly 1/64th of the total load?)
Any thoughts or insights would be appreciated,
John Epstein
Passport Online
Toronto, Canada