Scalability of a pppoe server.

[Chuck Swiger]

Catalin Ioan CURCANU wrote:
[ ... ]
> If someone have a real experience with pppoe in a production environment
> please give me some advices about:
> 
> 1. How scalable is a pppoe server with 3000 users and how much of hardware
> resources eats in general. (CPU+physical memory)

I can recall people setting up mpd for PPPoE and handling 500-1000 users on 
moderate (1GHz P3 + 1GB RAM) hardware.  I'm not sure whether the program has a 
limit at 1024 due to the select() call, but perhaps others can give you 
insight about running ~3000 users.

> 2. All data from connected LANs would be trasported to pppoe server 
> throught VLANs. Which would be the posibility of anyone from a connected location of
> doing a man in the middle attack and gather passwords from its local area
> network using arp poisoning? if that's possible, are there any methods that
> eliminates the effects on a such attack?

The simple answer is that it depends upon your switches and setting up 
individual ports for specific VLANs properly, but in general, you should not 
rely on VLAN switches to provide complete and reliable separation of traffic.

   http://www.sans.org/resources/idfaq/vlan.php

-- 
-Chuck