🚀 go-pugleaf

Demon's Corporate Services people redeemed themselves today, successfully
installing our ISDN router and configuring the Mac network for use with a
Network Dial-Up (NDU) account.

For anyone considering an NDU account, the basic facts and first
impressions ...


What is it?

An NDU account is a method of connecting a whole network of machines to
Demon. The benefits are equipment cost-savings if you have a larger
network, and significantly faster access.


How does it work?

What happens is that, anytime any of the Macs on the network want to access
the Internet, they do so transparently - no visible connection or logon.
The Mac asks the router for a connection; if it's already online, it
establishes the connection instantly, otherwise it dials in and logs on, a
process taking only a few seconds. The router can handle any reasonable
number of simultaneous connections (I don't know what the maximum is, but
it can handle our full complement of 25 machines if required).


What do you need?

A router: the box which links the network to Demon.
An ISDN2 line.
A Demon NDU account.

(Actually, we have ISDN30 as we have a digital switchboard and all our
voice calls are made via IDSN, so in our case the switchboard engineer ran
off two channels to a port which mimicks an ISDN2 line.)


What does it cost?

The router: �795.
ISDN2 line: Not sure - see above - �400??
NDU account: �750 setup, then �100/month (this includes your own domain
name)

With modems costing around �100 each, you need a network of over 20 Macs -
with everyone needing Internet access - before you save on equipment costs.
And you need /reasonably/ high usage before the faster speeds save you
money on usage costs, given the extra �90/month in subs.

But when you take into account the cost of the staff time involved, it may
be economic at an earlier stage.


What's involved in the setup?

In our case, about a billion calls to Demon, the head of Corporate Services
shrugging her shoulders and spuriously claiming that our network was faulty
- and a 7-page letter of complaint to Cliff. This latter bit worked
wonders, incidentally.

For future Mac customers, Demon should be rather more helpful. We did a
deal whereby they paid part of the cost of hiring an outside Mac network
consultant to set it up in return for one of their engineers following him
around our offices to learn how to configure a Mac network ...

Anyway, the gist of it is:

Plug the router into the mains, the network and the ISDN line. Configure
the router by temporarily connecting it to a PC or Mac - this is the bit
which Demon claimed was unnecessary, since they supplied the router
preconfigured, yet which still took their engineer about 40 minutes ...

Then, on each Mac on the network, configure either MacTCP or TCP/IP,
depending on the age of the system. Configuring each Mac is a 2-minute
affair. Just tell the software the addresses of the machine itself (each
mac has its own IP address - Demon give you about 100 of them and you
assign them sequentially), the router and the DNS servers, then switch the
connection method from PPP to Ethernet.

For fixed machines, you no longer need PPP. For PowerBooks which will
continue to use dial-up access outside the office, you have to create a
second 'environment' and then switch between the two. This is a slight pain
that I'll create a Keyquencer macro to sort.


What's it like?

Everyone on the network having access to the net without separate modems
and phone extensions is a huge boon, as is the ability to have a number of
people online simultaneously.

The fact that there's no visible connection or logon process makes it
friendlier for the more IT-phobic. As far as they are concerned, they have
a permanent connection and thus need only worry about the actual software
they're using.

Connection speeds? Well, I got peaks of anything up to 80k/sec reported
during email downloads, but 4-6k/sec seemed to be the norm for
web-browsing. Even so, that's a significant improvement on the typical
2.5k/sec I get with a 33k modem, and the difference is very noticeable.

Will report back further in the new year once I have more experience of the
setup. In the meantime, I hope the above is of interest/use to someone, and
at least it makes a change to be providing, rather then requesting, info in
here!

Ben
-- 
Ben Lovejoy             | For special addresses
ben@lovejoy.demon.co.uk | (auto-responder, etc):
www.lovejoy.demon.co.uk | autoresponder@lovejoy.demon.co.uk