Portmaster Software Internals

David Stoddard (dgs@us.net)
Wed, 15 Nov 1995 22:54:45 -0500 (EST)

As a regional ISP, we have POPs in several locations on the east coast.
When we first started 2.5 years ago, we used UNIX systems with Digiboards
(PC/16em) and Morningstar (MST) PPP to support dialup SLIP/PPP connections
to our network. About a year ago, we switched to Livingston Portmasters in
all of our new POPs, and concentrated all of the existing Digiboard equipment
into two of our older POPs. We now need to add more ports to our older
POPs and we are hesitant to purchase any more of the older Digiboard/MST
equipment.

Now for the problem -- our Digiboard sites are configured to ask for
a login userid, password, and then produce a prompt at which the user can
type either slip, ppp, or menu for various services. If we add Livingston
Portmasters to these sites, our subscribers will have to utilize a different
login configuration with their software (for those of you that have large
sites, you know how darn difficult this can be to get users to change their
configuration, not to mention the load on support staff while customers
make the transistion).

What we would like to do is let them login to the Postmasters using a
standard Portmaster login that rlogins to one of our UNIX servers and
results in our usual menu shell prompt. If the user types ppp or slip,
we would like to send some form of request to the Portmaster to have it
change from host login mode to SLIP or PPP mode. That way, our users
will not have to change anything and we can integrate the Portmasters
directly into our environment. An alternative is to run SLIP/PPP from
the UNIX systems over the rlogin connection to the Portmaster, but this
is less than elegant considering the resource drain on the UNIX servers.
Our UNIX systems are BSDI 1.1 and 2.0 systems.

So, our question is this: Is there any way to send a request to the
Portmaster to get it to switch modes (rlogin/PPP/SLIP) in the middle of
a session? We have plenty of UNIX programming expertise on-hand to get
the job done -- we just need the specs on the interface to implement it.
Is this possible Livingston? Thanks in advance for your help ...

---
Dave Stoddard  | US Net Incorporated - info@us.net
dgs@us.net     | SLIP/PPP/Lease Lines: DC, Baltimore, Richmond, Santa Domingo
(301) 572-5926 | Internet Backbone for the Dominican Republic