[ale] max on SS2 serial ports?

Keith R. Watson keith.watson at gtri.gatech.edu
Mon Apr 12 10:38:31 EDT 1999


At 09:21 PM 4/10/99 -0400, you wrote:
>
>I want to set up my SS2 as a firewall/masq gateway, but I'm wondering if
>it would be capable on two points:  
>
>  1) How high can the serial ports go?  Are they reliable at this speed?
>     How can they be made to go faster (if MAX is around 38.4K)?
>
>  2) Can the box as a whole handle the burdens of routing that an analog 
>     dialup would introduce?  Would it be able to handle the volume
>     that an ISDN connection would be capable of?
>
>
>Thanks,
>Eric


Eric,

As I recall a SS2 serial port is not a consistent performer much past
19.2K. To get better performance you need an sbus card or use the network
interface to connect to an ISDN router. Since the serial port is
asynchronous and ISDN is synchronous the conversion results in a 20% loss
of bandwidth due to the start and stop bits needed by the async data
stream. By using the serial port at 38.4K and assuming no data compression
the net through put would only be 38.4 * .8 = 30.72K.

keith
-------------

Keith R. Watson                        GTRI/AIST
Computer Services Specialist IV        Georgia Institute of Technology
keith.watson at gtri.gatech.edu           Atlanta, GA  30332-0816
404-894-0836






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