Conference irocz::common_brouters

    Not to my knowledge.  This was not considered an important target
    market for the product(s).  I'm speaking on behalf of the development
    group here, I don't know if perhaps some people have tried it on their
    own.
    
    Tim

	I have been looking at the possibility of testing this 
	just recently. The card that DEC used to resell
	(still does??????) is the EICON Diva V2.0.  This is the
	card I was going to start with. 

	I think I can make a good case for having a seperate 
	router (i.e. the new RouteAbout Access ISDN/IP) rather
	than a PC card :

		1. easier to install/replace (don't have to take
                   the PC apart and get the card to install.

	           The plan is to make the RouteAbout family
                   configurable from a central site, so no
                   on-site know-how needed.

		2. can extend the office easily - add more 
		   PC/workstations

		3. faster to 'reset' if the network software
                   gets 'confused'.

		4. For a lap-top, you just have an ethernet card
                   for the office and home.

		5. getter interworking with central site router.
                   The IETF 'standards' tend to wonder from one
                   vendor to the next. For the best 'Telesaving'
                   features, buy DIGITAL for both ends :).

		   As an example, Microsoft have invented their own
                   PPP compression thing.

		   See white-paper : 
		    http://www-engreo.reo.dec.com/ipeg/people/swaters/Tsave-mn.pdf  
		    http://www-engreo.reo.dec.com/ipeg/people/swaters/Tsave-mn.htm

		6. better performance. Leave the PPP compression to the
                   router CPU.  With the RouteAbout Access ISDN/IP, you can
                   see compression rates of 10:1 for a standard MS help file!

		7. better routing/fail-over features. The Routeabout family
                   can 'route' around problems. If you have a failure on one
		   link to a central site, it can use another.

		I could probably go on, but I expect you are asleep now.

	Goodnight,
	Steve.

    Unfortunately a concious decision was made NOT to address that
    particular market.  In general they want things like dynamic address
    assignment, Radius, etc, that we decided not to invest in.  It is quite
    possible that many of the standard PC cards will work to connect to the
    RouteAbouts, but they will probably require static address assignment,
    etc, that are not really what that market (PC access) is looking for in
    a central site access server.
    
    Just to set the record straight, it wasn't that we didn't know what to
    do, it was a decision not to spend the money and time to address the
    market.
    
    Tim

    Hi,
    
    I have already tested a RAS dial-up connection between a WIN95-PC with 
    DIEHL EICON 1.00 to a RA EI (SW 2.0-2). 
    There was no Problem at all, but I had to specify a IP-Address for 
    PPP-Interface of WIN95 within the transfer-network of PPP.
    A Coworker of me alrady tested dialup-PPP between Linux with Teles16.3
    without any problem. 
    
    Johann Wiesheu
     (CSC-Munich)

    
    Hi Johann, that's encouraging news!  I'm working on
    'Telesaving' features for ISDN in the COMET code
    products and would like to spend some time playing
    with the EICON card to collect details on :

	1) Multilink PPP working
	2) MPPC (Microsfot compression). I guess we will
           need support for this variant of Stac.
        3) Idle-timer workings
	4) 'ISDN' friendly W95 working.


    I work from home with ISDN and play the game of trying
    to 'keep the ISDN link idle' and still get some work
    done.  I found the biggest problem with W95 was the
    pro-active browsing it does in the background, for 
    example checking server/printer/remote-disk resources 
    with frequent SMB messages.  Microsoft have had problem
    reports on this (see Knowledge Base), but to my 
    knowledge, still don't offer much in the way of tuning for
    this noise. For a PC with an ISDN link as it's main 
    connection, it should be possible to set this browsing to
    be 'reactive', i.e. only browse when a resource is
    actually used.

    I would be interested in any ideas you have on reducing
    the cost of using ISDN.  I keep a web page with the 
    on-going work in the COMET code on this :

	http://www-engreo.reo.dec.com/ipeg/people/swaters/telesave.htm

    There is a white-paper (also available on the internet) at :

	http://www-engreo.reo.dec.com/ipeg/people/swaters/white/Tsave-mn.htm


    Regards, Steve.