A little bit OT: an interesting POP

"Jay West" wrote: I'm coming in midstream here, so sorry if I'm on the wrong thread. Most terminal servers will recognize a PPP frame when presented at the login prompt. And most pops contains terminal servers. In general you can drive through the login prompt or use one of PPP's authentication protocols. In general ISP's don't configure them to allow access to any internal shell. They usually just do authentication using RADIUS and then start up a PPP session. back in the day I did some work for ahem, a large company which sold big terminal servers to a large company which subcontracted pops to another large company. At that time AOL didn't use PPP. We ended up tunneling their protocol inside a tcp session back to their servers. We certainly supported PPP (and multicast) but the end customer (AOL) had 'special needs' and a huge customer base. The box I worked on had 2000 modems in it. Most of isp style terminal servers will handle various flavors of audio modems as well as v.56 and ISDN. And even voip in some cases (or maybe lots these days). In the back it's all IP traffic. Ascend was one big player. Cisco came in late. I worked for a company which was bought by Nortel which came in the middle. -brad