Multipoint Dial-in Servers

Figure 7-4 shows three geographically isolated computers communicating through a point-to-point link to an endpoint machine on a network. However, the network endpoint machine can communicate with the nomadic computers through a multipoint link, thus making it a multipoint dial-in server. (You can also set up a dial-in server with dynamic point-to-point connections, as explained in "Dial-in Server With Dynamic Point-to-Point Link".)

The dial-in server can communicate with all the machines on the other end of its multipoint PPP link. Though the machines in Figure 7-4 can directly communicate with the multipoint dial-in server, they cannot communicate directly with each other. They must pass information to each other through the dial-in server.