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