Thanks for the help. Perhaps you would be able to help with some other matters ?
The background is that I and some friends intend to purchase a permanent connection to the 'net - somewhere between 128K & 512K depending on how much money we can come up with - and I will set up a dial-in system at my house (and therefore have the benefit of the full speed of the connection !) for the others to use. So as to gain as much experience and knowledge as I can I want to set up the home system so that it emulates a major ISP as closely as possible. I have 3 486 machines and 1 pentium 133 and 1 pentium 200. As I understand it, a major ISP has on seperate machines proxy server (squid), web server (apache), news server (slrn/inn ?), mail server (sendmail), IP allocation (DHCP). No firewall is required because no user will have a shell account and no machine on my LAN will have any information of any value. If I am right a firewall is not needed by an ISP because the clients both send and receive requests and information and so the servers have to sit outside of any firewall anyway ??? The problem I have and which I was asking about (indirectly) in the last post is that obviously I require both the permanent 'net connection and the 15 incoming lines to be connected to this network. I think that I can connect an ISDN card in the proxy server machine directly to the permanent connection and so give the whole LAN permanent access. If that is so then that is easy ! I assume that to handle 15 incoming lines I need 15 modems (and 30 lines requires 30 modems etc). How do I connect these 15 modems to the LAN ? Do I need 3 machines each with 5 serial ports ? I understood that something like the cisco 1603 ISDN router has 'x' number of serial ports that the modems plug into and a 10baseT connection to plug into the LAN. The router is then in charge of directing traffic back to the requesting client. But if this is the case, who verifies the logins, assigns IP numbers and initiates the ppp connection to the dial-in client ? As the 1603 router is fairly expensive, I am trying to find a way around that. Also, the information on the telco's page implied that a remote access server was used in place of 'x' number of modems and was cheaper and easier than that many modems as well. Have you any knowledge on this ? If more computers are needed they are fairly cheap second hand so please make whatever suggestion you think is appropriate. I hope the above is clear. I sincerely appreciate your time in answering my last mail and in reading this. Ivan.
