Linux-Hosted Frame Relay

Anthony L. Cook

Sidebar 1

The frame relay protocol is gaining popularity and has the potential to become the standard for wide area networking in North America. Although it is similar to X.25, frame relay is faster, cheaper, and generally more capable than both X.25 and typical leased-line approaches to WAN building. These factors, coupled with easier maintenance, higher reliability, and wide-spread availability, make frame relay an ideal framework for expanding existing networks or installing new ones. Parallel to the gains by frame relay, Linux, with the release of the 2.0 kernel, has been making rapid inroads into corporate IS departments. Often serving as an integral part of the institutional intranet, Linux has already proven itself a capable network server and is well-positioned to help growing networks handle expanding needs while meeting demands for low cost. Therefore, Linux should be seen as an ideal, if not natural, partner to frame relay for expanding or installing wide area networks (WANs). In this article, I will describe how the Linux/frame relay partnership was used to set up a WAN for one of my company's clients.

Many of our customers have offices in several cities and require fast and reliable communications with the central database server from each of them. When one such customer expanded their operations from their home in Manhattan, they opened offices in Baltimore, Houston, and Philadelphia. They demanded low-cost yet reliable communications from each of their new offices to their Linux-based database server. Because each office would have a combination of networked PCs, ASCII terminals, and high-speed forms printers, Linux communications servers were specified for frame relay and installed in each location.

Server Design

Each comm server needed to accommodate a multitude of routing and print service requirements, both within the local environment and with the New York database server.