Our company has invested immensely on "machine-to-machine" modems, equipped in embedded machinery over the last decade.
These work with old-school internet dial-up service.
These machines need to connect to the Internet to send data to a central server using TCP/IP.
Internet Service Providers are increasingly closing their dial-up services, as it is being phased out by broadband access.
Unfortunately, these "machine-to-machine" modems only work with dial-up access: not broadband.
It is becoming increasingly hard to find dial-up access ISPs nowadays, so I was thinking about creating our own dial-up service in ones of our offices.
I assume it needs to have a dedicated land-line, a modem installed inside the server and plugged to the land-line, and an ethernet card connected to the office's router, in order to share that connection over the modem.
Then, I am not too sure what options are available software-wise regarding the dial-up server software.
Ideally, we would prefer this to work on a Windows box, as we are only using Windows servers. Any experience of walkthrough on getting done this to share?
Also, what about the limitations, for example, if two machines call in the dial-up server at the same time. I assume such a simple system would only be able to serve one machine at a time, and that the second machine dialing in would receive a "busy" signal?
Thanks in advance for your views.
Best Answer
It seems like microsoft has the RRAS service inside most of it's server software, and can (probably) install as many phone lines as the server can support cards.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd469790.aspx
When I used to support dialup, we used a dedicated RAS server (Ascend) and a dedicated RADIUS server (freeradius) because it allowed us to connect a few E1 lines, which are a lot more space efficient than individual modems and phone lines.
Obviously, if the phone line is in use, the second caller will receive a busy signal.