29 Nov
2005
29 Nov
'05
3:03 a.m.
You wrote....
beg to differ. The portmaster was not (by any means)
carrier class.
Sure it was. I was there ;) Debatable, but it certainly was
ubiquitous.
You're confusing your decades - In the day I was referring to, large ISP's
used portmasters, as there was no such thing as a tnt/max at the time, at
least not commonly. We had lots of portmasters, then we later went to cisco
AS5200/5800. But in the very early days, those did not exist either.
It was popular among those who where not colocated
and/or didn't have much
money.
I disagree. Most of the large ISP's around here started with PM's.
They
stayed with PM's for many years.
The ascend max & tnt where the carrier class
defacto standard (ask uunet).
Just because uunet used them? I think not. Depends on
your timeframe again.
I personally despised the ascend max & tnt. I've watched them catch fire
before, not just one random event - really crappy hardware design. Their
menu configuration is simply grotesque (about as horrid as the pipeline 50
config menus). I refused to use them (as did many other ISP's). I didn't
care for the USR total control stuff much either, but I'm a huge fan of
their courier I-modems and the v.everythings.
having said that, the PM would be a good choice for
someone who wanted
a cheap terminal server.
but if you wanted a high quality small terminal server I think you'd be
better off with a xylogics annex. The PM is easier to configure but the
annex will last longer. Both are based on low end x86 cpu's but the
xylogic's hardware and QA was much better than livingston's.
Again, I
humbly disagree. The PM was used by those providing large scale
dial up service very commonly, the xylogics annex was not very common in
that environment. For good reason.
But today, my ISP uses dual cisco 5800's. I always thought the 7206 stuffed
on top of each one was a kludge, but then, I'm still a big cisco fan.
Jay West