Re: PPPkit 2.0 (was: Importance of "W" f

[Jo Even Skarstein <joska@nuts.edu>]

On Tue, 25 Nov 1997, Martin-Eric Racine wrote:

>  >> Multi-user is a growning industry, on the PC side, so why not here?
>  >
>  >1) Most users do not have multiple computers (particluarly Atari's)
> 
> I disagree. All of us here have at least one ST machine and
> either a MEGA-STE, TT or Falcon on top of that. 

I have a Falcon, a Mega ST4 and a STE. I plan to upgrade the Mega so I
can use it to read mail and news when I'm home during the holiday, and
the STE is nice for games, but I can't imagine using them in a
network. For what? The only thing that work better on the ST's are
games and demos, and neither works with MiNTOS running... 

Nevertheless, I'n *not* against IP-masquerading or anything, it's just
that it complicates matters and is IMO not needed in a basic dial-up
package for beginnners. It's better to compile "add-on packages"
later.

> Others have a couple of Ataris and a Linux box, with a Win95
> Pentium lying around somewhere in the house.

...and hence no need for any masquerading or routing, the
linux/wintel-box handles all this already.

> I have even impressed a highly paid system administrator when I
> showed him my TT running its basic MiNT setup. He couldn't find
> anything nasty about it. In fact, he just loved it and asked if
> he could still buy himself one somewhere.

I can find one very nasty and serious flaw with MiNT that prevents it
from being useful in a professional environment (as anything other
than a dumb terminal): Memory-handling. No way you can run your
MiNT-based server for months, you'll have to reboot it very often due
to fragmentation. 

I set my Falcon up as a ftp- and http-server a couple of months ago,
and I had to reboot it every morning even with very modest traffic. I
gave up the project after less than a week.


/*
** Jo Even Skarstein    http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~josk/
**
**    beer - maria mckee - atari falcon - babylon 5
*/