On Sat, 19 Apr 1997, Benoit MARTEL wrote:
> A more sober idea would simply to use both ports to get twice as much 
> bandwith between the two machines. You could make it transparent to pppd 
> by having processes on each side that split the stream in two and put it 
> back together on the other side. This would be nicer with threads since 
> you probably end up needing several processes to do the blocking reads 
> and writes; but oh well. When exams are over, if I can get my hands on 
> another pair of cables, I'll give it a try and let you know what I got.
> 
> Of course, if someone has already done this, I'd like to hear from them 
> but it doesn't sound like it would be very popular (most people need the 
> other serial for printing or something).

That sounds like a job for multilink PPP... it's popular with ISDN users,
since you can use both B channels of the line to get 128K. You can also
dynamically add/remove channels, so for example, you could have a 64K
connection normally, and then go up to 128K when you need the bandwidth,
then drop back down to 64K when you don't anymore.

Multilink PPP supports any number of links, BTW, not just two... if you
had a bunch of serial ports, you could get even higher bandwidth :)

I don't think there's a multilink PPP implementation for NetBSD yet
though, but there is one for FreeBSD which can probably be ported without
too much difficulty... take a look at

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/incoming/mpd-1.0b3.tgz
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