:-)  Steve, did the authentication ever go down? Never, au sio? I miss those days, on 33.6kbps modems we could easily do was today ati egde, 3g+ or wimax crap!  Difference  today is always ON. Authetication via Radius AAA was so easy and backed up. 

 
OMG, nostalgia just struck.......
I remember using Equinox SST multiserial boards to build a 128-port
terminal server with portslave on linux. Damn, those were the days.
And yes, we were using 14400 baud modems.

Regards,
Steve