About 4 years ago, I set up a modem pool for a former employer. The general
approach was to do it through /etc/inittab, having a *tty (I think we used
agetty) process watch each serial port that had a modem on it. agetty (or
whatever) can run a program other than /bin/login when it senses a
connection, and we wrote a short script that allowed the user to choose
between a ppp and a shell connection. The ppp choice called a second script,
which set up the actual ppp connection. We had a pool of IP addresses, and
the second script assigned the first available one to the line.
Way back then, out-of-the-box kernels only supported 4 ppp lines, and we had
8 modems, so there was other fiddling we had to do to account for that
limit. This, as I recall, is why we assigned the addresses dynamically. Were
I doing it now, I'd just assign an address permanently to each line ...
unless my app required associating an IP address with each remote machine.
In that case, I think the old script we used for address assignment could be
modified to handle that, working from a passwd-like flat file.
Anyway, if this sounds helpful, get back to me and I'll try to dig out the
scripts we used back then.
BTW, no, I've never seen any documentation anywhere of this approach, but I
know of a couple of sites that have used variants of it (mainly different in
that they use a different *tty*, I think mgetty) successfully.
Hope this helps. Good luck.
At 06:00 PM 12/16/98 -0600, Hughes, Timothy P wrote:
>I am sorry about the confusion, I have recieve a few mails concerning
>this same subject. I mean to say that Windoz95 does not recieve the
>gateway information, or an IP address when using the PPP protocol. The
>modems handshake fine, but they can not negotiate a proper protocol. I
>am trying to create a dynamic IP address modem pool for my employer, but
>I have not been able to get either PPP or slip to work in providing
>dynamic IP addresses to the users. I have read all of the documentation
>that comes with both slip and PPP, and have tried many different ways to
>setup dynamic IP addressing, but I have yet been unsuccessfull. I am
>just wondering if there is more documentation out there on setting up a
>dynamic IP PPP server or slip server. Thanks for any help. Sorry again
>for the initial confusion.
[deleted]
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
762 Garland Drive
Palo Alto, CA 94303-3603
650.321.3561 voice 650.322.1209 fax [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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