Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!elbereth.rutgers.edu!hardees.rutgers.edu!ron From: ron@hardees.rutgers.edu (Ron Natalie) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans Subject: Re: Ethernet terminal servers Message-ID: Date: 22 Jan 89 14:48:51 GMT References: <6556@fluke.COM> <13718@cup.portal.com> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 19 The first reason is that most of our terminal traffic comes from public rooms and from dialins (most of the offices have dedicated workstations or PC's). In this case, it is not clear what machine people will want to connect to. So rather than having 8 modem lines going here, 8 going there, these terminals talk to one machine, these to another, we just pool all the resources on the terminal servers. From there the user can go anywhere. At Rutgers, we span seven campuses. Each campus has public facilities that need to make use of stuff on other campuses. TCP terminal servers make this easy. A couple of campuses have terminal servers but no login-able machines there. Another reason is that most of the popular machines around here (VAX's and Sun's) have lousy RS-232 ports. DEC has never been convinced that you shouldn't interrupt VMS on every character the users types and the 16 port Sun ALM units never were that reliable. Rutgers.edu is a USENET backbone hub, and we finally scrapped the ALM in favor of just putting the trailblazers and everything else on one of the terminal servers. -Ron