[plug] Parallel linkups.

[Bernd Felsche]

On Wednesday 23 June 2004 12:41, Onno Benschop wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-06-23 at 14:20, Bernd Felsche wrote:
> > It's not quite "straight-forward", configuration wise.

> I'm confused. You stated that the services you wanted to tunnel
> were non-interactive. Why do you need to route anything at all? An
> SSH tunnel will do all that you require.

Selecting and routing are more the issue than the nature of the
tunnel.

> If you are talking about web-traffic and proxy stuff, that is
> interactive traffic and SSH could also work for that, but the
> configuration would be a little trickier.

Interactive in this context means response-sensitive such as in
telnet. It is absolutely necessary to prevent luser panic by
providing at least adequate echo response, so "latency" at the
desktop is THE big issue.

Users do not panic when they browse the web and there's a 5-second
delay because that delay is usually obscured by eye-candy.

Having the hour-glass pop up on every keystroke during terminal
emulation is not what I would consider "user-friendly". :-)

The customer has had previous experience with routing
response-sensitive telnet traffic through the Internet before and
been discouraged from doing so for "eternity" due to latency and
connectivity problems.

> You do know about SSH tunnels, not just an SSH terminal session?

I definitely to *not* want terminal sessions through the tunnel;
that's the reason for the physical private network over ATM.
Unfortunately, it only appears to have an 8 kilobyte per second
bandwidth. so emails and web traffic over that pipe are right out of
the question; as is upgrading the bandwidth to accomodate such
traffic, mainly due to cost.

> Also, it is entirely possible that I completely misunderstand your
> requirement, but I'm basing my advice on what I read from you.

I didn't want to write a 20-page outline of technical and political
reasons. It would appear that I was a bit too terse and hence unable
to convey the whole requirement.

Just because you and I understand latency in interactive sessions
and hence make due allowance depending on the type of connection,
lusers are in a different boat. Lusers reboot their PCs when the
terminal session appears unresponsive for 10 seconds. They are so
used to PCs crashing and applications "locking up" that that is how
they "solve" the problem.

-- 
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