terminal server recommendation

Shawn McMahon smcmahon at eiv.com
Wed May 2 11:43:37 UTC 2001


On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 08:12:34PM -0000, Charles Smith wrote:
> 
> I would like to deploy a terminal server in several of my POPs, however cost 
> is a slight issue. Can anyone on the list recommend a fairly inexpensive 
> terminal server (besides Cisco)? Obviously the terminal server should be 
> reliable and work - it is the little things that count.

Here are the average uptimes of the three types of terminal server we
had back in the day when I ran a small ISP.

Computone Powerrack: 2 weeks.  (It will go considerably longer if you waste
one of the ports as a serial console, we had modems on all ports and that
caused it to fill it's buffer and crash periodically, Computone probably
sent us two dozen revisions of the firmware before they solved that problem.)

BSD/OS 2.0.1 on IBM PC Server: 1 month.  (Would crash about every 7 or 8 
weeks, so we rebooted it once a month whether it needed it or not.)

RedHat Linux 4.1 homebuilt: 6 months.  (Would have been longer, but there
was a power outage that lasted longer than the UPS, and then about 5 months
later they took it out of service and replaced with a Computone.)

If price is really an object, build your own.  If reliability is an object,
you get what you pay for.

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