Allocating b-channels on demand

Bill Butler (bill@telalink.net)
Wed, 06 Aug 1997 18:14:48 -0500

Trying to set up a 5 port bri portmaster to dial-up to a pm3. Everything is
working great if I wanted to have all 4 b-channels connected all time. In
an effort to only use the B-channels only when there is actually traffic
that warrants their use, I attempted to work with the high water mark. My
dial-out interface is set up as follows:

testpipe> sh telalink
Location: telalink Type: Automatic
Destination: Negotiated Netmask: 255.255.255.0
Protocol: PPP Options: Quiet, VJ-Comp, Multilink
Group: 0 Max Ports: 8
Idle Timeout: 2 minutes High Mark: 100 bytes
Mtu: 1500 Async Map: 00000000
Username: testpipe Password: telasar
Telephone: 7771111

As you can see, I have Type set to Automatic, Max ports set to 8 (yes 512K)
and my High Mark set to 100 bytes. Here's the most interesting part: No
matter what value I choose to use for High Mark, I always get the same
behavior from the PM. Like clockwork (every 120 secs), the pm dials up
another b channel and adds it to the multilink group. The channels go up
and they never come back down.

I expect someone on this list is going to tell me that I should set the
connection to On-Demand. I did that already & also worked with a wide array
of high marks. In this case, I found that the high mark also seemed to have
no effect. The first b-channel would indeed kick in on demand but
subsequent channels never did connect.

If any one is doing a dedicated connection with bandwidth-on-demand and has
a snapshot of their configuration (like the one above), I would appreciate
it. Megazone, you probably have an easy answer as well.

--

Bill Butler Bill@Telalink.Net President, Chief Operating Officer 615.321.9100 ext.230

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