Date: Wed, 18 Oct 1995 22:40:19 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: multimedia@rah.star-gate.com Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Bragging rights.. Message-ID: <17846.814081219@time.cdrom.com>
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Well, this is half me needing to tell *somebody* and half actually being informative since some of the people on this list have wanted to test various FreeBSD audio/video apps with me and were frustrated that I only had that dinkly little V.34 modem. Well no more! I have now joined Amancio in the extended peni^H^H^H^Hbandwidth ISDN club! :-) I've implemented it in the cheapest way possible (no fancy pipeline solutions used here :-): A TA is hooked to a normal FreeBSD box with a standard 16550 serial port on both ends. I'm using the ADTRAN TAs - not the dirt-cheapest or the highest tech, but they're the only ones that did *everything* I wanted and did it *now*. Talk to Motorola and it's "yeah, you can have async bonding in a PROM upgrade RSN - we promise!" My FreeBSD gateway machine makes an ISDN call to the other end and does a standard SLIP login. The other route I could have gone cheaply would have been a pair of ISDN plug-in cards, but it doesn't look like we have our act together in the states anywhere near as well as the Germans do.. The only practical ISDN card solutions I could find were German ones, and I didn't want to play with trying to adapt a EURO-ISDN solution to my U.S. line.. :-) If I ever manage to hook something up with Digiboard, however, this may change. We can always sell the TAs! :-) So anyway, it works really well. The service is CENTREX ISDN between my house and Walnut Creek and doesn't cost me anything per-minute, meaning I can leave it up 24 hours a day (and will). I'm actually plugged directly into a serial port on freefall - it was the only machine in our entire machine room WITH a serial card plugged into it at the time! :) I get around 10.2K/sec with compressed tar files, which is actually pretty amazing (read: impossible? :) considering that i'm only running *async* bonding for 115.2Kbaud with all the start and stop bit overhead as opposed to the full 128Kb data rate I could get if I was running full sync serial. Since I'm in the same PacBell central office as the other end (couldn't do CENTREX otherwise) I can get the full 64K/B-channel. Verdict: It's not bad! Serial I/O overhead on freefall appears to be fairly negligible (I was worried about that for awhile) and I've gone almost 4x my previous V.34 communications rate.. I'd recommend it to anyone! :) I'm impressed that this was also managed with only two TAs and a pair of FreeBSD boxes - no other custom hardware of any sort was required. I can see a lot of 386 boxes coming back to service as dedicated ISDN routers in the next few years.. :-) Now if I can just get my hands on a pair of ISDN cards to get that full pipe.. [he gazes off into the distance..] Jordan
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