At 1:57 PM 12/10/93 -0500, Paul Holbrook wrote:

We're trying to agree on a Network Access Server (NAS, what we all used to call terminal servers) for our NSF-sponsored Rural Datafication Project, which involves working in parnership with state nets in our region to expand dialup infrastructure in CICNet region of the country. We'd like to get some feedback from folks in other regions.

We've come down to considering the Livingston Portmaster, the Xyplex MX-1600, and to a lesser extent, the Cisco CS-500 series. Right now we're not considering any other vendors; we're trying to stay with gear that people in the state nets involved in the project have used.

Mostly out of curiosity, have you not considered NetBlazers? (And if they have been discarded, was it for technical or administrative/operational reasons?) We're beginning to gain some experience with them, and I think the folks at OARnet have been using them for a while. One of the most significant factors in the differences we saw was whether or not you were going to be routing to a remote LAN, or just providing SLIP/PPP for a single node (Workstation/Mac/PC, etc). In the latter case, it used to be that Xyplex was the most cost effective. This is what's in use at CMU for SLIP service, and Tom Holodnik there has done a lot of work on distributed configuration and authentication for them. Gene