IP Forwarding

Wed Nov 12 02:21:47 UTC 1997

Hi all...

I've been lurking here for a while, and realize that I really don't know 
much about the innards of networking, but I do have a question I was 
wondering if you could answer. If I'm in the wrong place, flame me, kick 
me, do whatever :)

We have customers in Europe who need to download large (10 Meg+) files 
from us on an almost daily basis. They are all on ISDN or other low 
bandwidth dial-up so it takes them quite some time, if they are even 
succesful at all. At first glance a mirror site doesn't appeal to us 
since we have very frequent updates and need to provide security with 
frequent new user adds and changes. For now we've been living with the 
slow speeds and dropped transfers, but here's what I was wondering:

Could a domain name be set up in Europe to point to a machine in Europe 
on a global service providers net (PSINet for instance). All this machine 
does is forward packets to a machine at our location on the same network 
(PSINet). The whole point of this would be to avoid overcrowded peer 
points where a lot of our current packetloss appears to be coming from.

Does this idea have any merit, or would I simply be exchanging one 
problem for another? Would it even work at all? Is there a better 
solution that would increase our connection quality to Europe while 
keeping the server at our location? Thanks for your time.

----------------------------
Tom Hubina
tomh at gibbsnc.com
Gibbs and Associates

805-523-0004
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