which versoin of windows??

buddylove · Joined: 09 Aug 2004 Posts: 8 Location: bangor maine

I own a small isp and we are working on putting in several hot spots. I am planning to use firstspot advanced with the centrailized network topology. Can I get by wth XP for my os on my first spot server? What are the pros and cons of the choices?? We allready have a regular isp setup running on linux.

Thanks!!
_________________
stacey j brann

alan · **Forum facilitator** Joined: 26 Sep 2003 Posts: 4435

FirstSpot can be run on 2000, XP and 2003. There might be some performance tune-up for using the server version. As far as FirstSpot is concern, all of the above Windows version are okay.
_________________
~ Patronsoft Limited ~

Warpgate · Joined: 27 Jul 2004 Posts: 7

Hi, Just to add 2p into this post,

SP2 for Windows XP mess's quiet a lot with the tcpip.sys file and will only allow 10 connections (max) at a time before it throws an event in the event log and starts dropping connections (MS say's it does not drop but rather place them in a queue, which will time out and get dropped!)

It might be worth reconsidering using firstspot on a basic XP install and use a dedicated server win2k or win2003 ..

If you want to run an ISP I assume you want more than 10 customers online at any one time <grin>

MS want to force SP2 on all uses and will stop doing updates outside of pre-upgraded SP2 machines...

Might be worth googling for this and verifying what I have said....

Cheers

alan · **Forum facilitator** Joined: 26 Sep 2003 Posts: 4435

Our initial test shows that XP SP2 does not affect FirstSpot. Since the 10 connection limit is on "simultaneous incomplete outbound TCP connection attempts", the "estalished" TCP does not count. Also note that there is no actual connection estalished between the client and FirstSpot since FirstSpot really routes the packets. The actual connection is between the client and the server.

Note that there is a "fix" available on the Internet on lifting this limitation.

We will do a more complete test on XP SP2 when FirstSpot 3.0 is released.
_________________
~ Patronsoft Limited ~

Warpgate · Joined: 27 Jul 2004 Posts: 7

Hey, thats great news.... (I was not trying to be negative, re-reading my post it possibly sounded that way)

I was just hearing the waves that were being made in some of the tech newsgroups about the conection limits early on as SP2 was released.. (I still think a proper server is better)

But it sounds like its not a problem after all... excellent work !!

Seen the fix already for the tcp sys file. Most P2P users will be grabbing this now ! if only we could throttle NAT translation sessions via Firstspot per user... now that would be good for everybody... If you end up with just 30 users each using Bittorrent with just 100 sources each thats 3000 translations !!! Could we limit the translation somehow ?? (maybe version 3 <grin> )

Anyway keep up the good work...