Lucent Technologies PortMaster - Manual (Page 139)

Configuring Dial-Out Connections 8-11
Setting Multiline Load Balancing
To set CHAP authentication for a location, use the following command:
Command> set location Locname chap on|off
Setting the Asynchronous Character Map
The PPP protocol supports the replacement of nonprinting ASCII data in the PPP stream.
These characters are not sent through the line, but instead are replaced by a special set
of characters that the remote site interprets as the original characters. The PPP
asynchronous map is a bit map of characters that should be replaced. The lowest-order
bit corresponds to the first ASCII character NUL, and so on. Most environments should
set the asynchronous map to 0 (zero) to achieve maximum throughput.
To set the PPP asynchronous map for a location, use the following command:
Command> set location Locname map Hex
Setting Multiline Load Balancing
You can set several ports to connect to a single location to distribute heavy traffic loads.
This capability is called multiline load balancing. You can define a threshold known as a
high-water mark for a location. The high-water mark triggers the PortMaster to bring up
an additional connection to the location when the amount of data specified by the
high-water mark is queued. The PortMaster examines the queue several times a minute
to determine if the high-water mark has been reached.
Load balancing is useful for on-demand routing because additional ports for the location
are added as the load exceeds what can be handled by one port. When the ports are idle
for the time specified by the set location idletime command (see “Setting the Idle
Timer” on page 8-10), all ports used for that connection are timed out simultaneously.
Load balancing can save you money because you do not need to configure your
network to handle the maximum load between locations. Periods of heavy traffic can be
handled by additional ports on an as-needed basis. At other times, the additional ports
can be used for other purposes.
When multiple ports are in use, each packet is queued on the port with the least
amount of traffic in the queue. Ports with very different speeds should not be combined
for load balancing purposes. The overall throughput for a given number of ports is
approximately equal to the number of ports multiplied by the throughput of the slowest
port.