On Sun, Dec 13, 1998 at 10:39:24PM +0800, ivan wrote:
> I am looking at setting up a dial-in machine to have a permanent connection
> to the net so that family and friends can have accounts with me rather than
> with seperate ISP's and therefore share the costs.
Heh, I've been telling people at work for weeks that the next evolution
of ISPs will be for the larger ones to grow while a group of friends and
family will create ISP "co-ops" to get out from under the larger ISPs. :)
> Having said that, is there some rough guide to calculating the mimimum
> bandwidth required to support a given number of users with 56K connections
> to my machine ?
No. But I do know you can fit a good 20-30 lines on 128k. It won't be
pretty if everyone tries to FTP at once, but on the whole it is quite snappy
> Also I think it is correct that I can download the newsgroups to my own
> machine and therefore newsgroup reading, whilst requiring a dial in line
> and processing and disc access time, does not use the band width except for
> when I download the information for redistribution ???
Correct. Although what I would recommend is not trying for a full news
feed. That is a T1 in and of itself. Just grab the groups that are
requested and tell the people up front they have to request news groups.
> I understand that it is no great drain to forward e-mail as it is received
> from the user and ftp to remote sites via my machine works similarly to web
> browsing in that the file is downloaded to my machine first and then
> distributed to the user. Is this also correct ?
Close. When FTPing the file is not, technically, downloaded to your
machine first and then distributed to the user. It is diwnloaded to your
machine *as* it is distributed to the user.
> Is there anything I have forgotten to ask (or don't know to ask) ?
Well, if you do do it, something that you may think about is looking at
"at" and "cron" extensively. Watch the utilization on your link to see when
the users are hitting it and then schedule bandwidth intensive stuff for the
off-hours. With at and a handmade perl script you could also have a
scheduled FTP process that people can request files from with email. Just
tell them the time the system will try to retrieve the file and
approximately when it will be there. Hrm... Oh, and definately, definately
setup a proxy and insist that your users use it whenever possible. I run a
small lan here at home and my proxy does get hit often enough to help and
that is only with me and my parents on the network. If you get ~20 people
dialing in chances are a lot of sites will be hit repeatedly. Like the
comic syndicates, pages they email to one another, etc.
--
Steve C. Lamb | Opinions expressed by me are not my
http://www.calweb.com/~morpheus | employer's. They hired me for my
ICQ: 5107343 | skills and labor, not my opinions!
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