More Windows XP niceties

[mbpark]

Hello,

I was just messing with my Socket PC Card Serial Port Adapter, and I plugged it into the XP laptop.

Windows XP has a potential of 256 COM ports on a single machine just like 2000 Professional. It has COM1-256 (Of which I am using 1 as external serial, Com3 for the ThinkPad Modem, COM4 for IRDA, and now COM5 for the Socket Card).

This is a welcome change, as Windows 2000 Professional has the same thing, except it doesn't save the port settings, even on SP2.

This means that I set and forget the port settings. Wicked.

This also means I can get a bunch of the Hydra PCI serial cards with 8 or 32 com ports each, and a nice big Netfinity server, and run RAS for 256 ports. This is significant because MS is trying to push Thin Servers and general-purpose servers.

What better way to push it than to integrate Active Directory into a RAS Dial-in box made by a manufacturer like Compaq or Dell, so that they can plug modems into it, or hook up the pool of US Robotics Sportsters they have, and instantly sidetrack the RAS authentication schemes organizations have had in place for a long time, specifically RADIUS, TACACS, and all the other fun ones ISPs use.

Plus, Windows XP Embedded is out. What makes you think they're not going to embrace and extend Remote Access to include Active Directory as the overall underlying authentication mechanism?

I could easily see them licensing the embedded technology to Toshiba, US Robotics, Compaq, Fujitsu, or Dell to make these small thin servers with loads of COM ports, or even Cisco to integrate with IOS as a module or SBC to plug into a high-end router.

Microsoft does it again.



I also got my old-school Adaptec 1460B PCMCIA SCSI adapter working (if I ever want to hook up old SCSI drives using Centronics or HD50 connections to the laptop. We bought it for a presentation where we hooked up a 9GB SCSI drive to a Pentium 166MMX laptop back in 1998, and ran Sybase ASE 11 off it).

[Undertoad]

They have finally caught up to what Unix was doing routinely in the mid 80s. You remember the Cellar mk 2 with its 7 modems? On a 386 system (later a 486) with 8 megs of memory? Unix was built to manage a ton of terminals...

[mbpark]

Tony,

I'm not only familiar with the Cellar, but what Avi Freedman was doing that made Ron Brandt drop his jaw (running Netaxs off of 3 SPARCstations at the time!). RADIUS is your friend, especially if you're an undisputed expert at configuring large-scale dial-in and authentication over UNIX systems like he and his staff are.

Needing a dual P4 Xeon or PIII-933 to support dial-in for groups of users is a waste of processing power. I've seen less powerful systems support more people, and yes, the Cellar was one of them .

UNIX has always been good with networking, much more so that anything Redmond can ever put out, and it will more than likely stay that way for many years, even if Microsoft does what they did in databases and buy the undisputed experts.

UNIX has done it for many years, as well as DOS programs with the right drivers.

Geez, I saw a Data General mainframe running BLIS/COBOL from 1974 do it . It's not that hard, apparently, if someone can do it on a machine with the processing power of a Commodore 64 .

However, this brings it to the masses.

Makes me want to plug in our Livingston Portmaster 2 and see what happens

Mitch