Hello Rowan_Crowe!

Friday September 26 1997 13:36, Rowan_Crowe wrote to Tony Frank:

 RC> Plenty! My home router is a 386dx40 with 8Mb of RAM, its only function is
 RC> to route IP packets and provide primary DNS for 'sensation.net.au' and a
 RC> couple of other domains. Even 8Mb is fairly generous for what it does, but
 RC> it's spare RAM so it's not going to waste. The "office"
router is a P90
 RC> with 24Mb RAM as that runs a HTTP/FTP proxy, news, several dialins and
 RC> permanent links, routing daemons, etc. My 2 unix boxes are at fairly
 RC> opposite extremes.

Ahuh...  I just seem to have a multitude of 486dx2-66's at the moment... 2
with 16 meg ram, 1 with 8 meg.  There's just a bit of a monitor &
keyboard shortage, though I'm sure I can find enough keyboards providing I
use some of the older "weird & chunky" ones... hehe...   
There is a bit of a case shortage too, but that's never stopped me in the
past.     I figured, I dont need a monitor or a case to run a unix system
once it's configured, I have all these spare systems just gathering dust, I
want to play with a lot of this stuff...    :-)

 RC> Why not get a dedicated line? :) I was doing dialup with my BBS/mailer
 RC> line and was finding I was online for hours at a time, during that time
 RC> people couldn't get their mail polls through...

The problem there is basically the $ - with my present job I havn't had
work for the last 1.5 months, so the budget is very thin, and at the moment
the family uses the BBS line to dial in for hours each night anyway.  (The
3 callers per week I think is mostly due to them not being able to get in
between 6pm & 11pm :-( )   I can't really complain too much, since I'm
not the owner of the line & I havn't contributed to the bill for quite
some time now.

 RC> If you've got the ca$h then think about a permanent link... Telstra charge
 RC> $500 install once off, then 19c per Mb inbound. No monthly charges, just
 RC> pure volume charging.
 RC> Or I can offer you a perm link at similar rates... ;)

I presume this is for 14.4k/28.8k dialup?

 RC> I'm in a similar situation. The DOS machine and frontdoor is almost a
 RC> legacy, for people to log into Sensation Brunswick they come through the
 RC> DOS machine. Unfortunately the ^&*{at}# likes to lock up at least
a few times
 RC> a day, sometimes when a user is online.

:-)   My BBS system only locks up if I play with it... ehehe...  It sits
there stable as hell for up to 30 days (longest recorded strech = 29.5
days) and then I come along and start playing around with some new program
I'm tinkering with, or I decide to "try out" some interesting
piece of software, and sure enough the system decides that it's had
enough... :-)   Or there's a power failure, like yesterday afternoon...

 RC> It would be good if I could move the fido mailer (and thus the modem) over
 RC> to the unix box, so then I didn't have to worry about the DOS box taking
 RC> out users. Unfortunately I think that to use a fido mailer on the unix
 RC> box, I'll also need to use a unix tosser etc. I'm not sure that I want to
 RC> fiddle that much with a) something that already works b) something that
 RC> I'm not really too interested in fiddling with.

Hmm, well I can't see why you'd need a unix tosser - you could move the
inbound/outbound mail packets to/from the unix machine using FTP & KA9Q
or something, my stumbling block (as I see it at the moment) is no
knowledge of a unix mailer...

 RC> Depends what you do. :) In the long run a permanent link, if you can
 RC> afford the relatively steep install, could be the go.
 RC> What about a cable modem?

I wish...   no, I dont have the $$$ for a regular dialup link, and I kind
of think that a cable modem would end up costing more than it's worth.  I
really only want to provide a solution other than people just plugging into
the wall socket and dialling, (as it happens now) basically so that if
people want to do their browsing etc, they just plug into the ethernet
(which each computer can do since they all have ethernet adaptors) and send
a request..  the system then dials in etc for them, assuming it's not
currently connected.   Even a "decent" modem serving system might
be the go, I just havn't found anything that'll do that yet.

Regards,

        Tony

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