Technical MedWeb Information

This diagram shows the general layout of the MedWeb. Following it are details about most of the items shown.

Frame Relay
Thanks to the point-to-cloud topology of Frame Relay, there only needs to be a single high-capacity circuit going to MIE headquarters. This one circuit is then connected to each of the MedWeb customers. (This is managed by the telecommunications companies, primarily GTE.) Though there is only one physical circuit, the data reaches only the correct destination because of special protocols that make it look, from a user's standpoint, like there are actually many separate circuits.

Internet connectivity
Full high-speed firewalled access to the Internet is available at a small premium to MedWeb customers. You will be able to use all of the major Internet services (World Wide Web, FTP, Usenet News, Telnet, etc.). Our firewall blocks nearly all types of connections originating from the Internet, so people outside the MedWeb can't get in, but people inside can get out.

Web page hosting
We can host your web pages, either on our server (with an address like www.med-web.com/yourcompany/), on a virtual host (yourcompany.med-web.com), or with your own domain name if you have one (www.yourcompany.com) (Our server already hosts www.parkview.com and www.fwmep.edu, among others). Of course, you can also set up your own web server. If you do so and would like it to be accessible from the Internet, just let us know (otherwise our firewall will block access).

Name services
Medweb customers can use our name server as their primary DNS server. Its address is 207.2.112.65 (our secondary name server is 207.2.112.126). If you do this, be aware that if there is ever a problem with your frame relay circuit, your local computers may have trouble talking to each other (they will not be able to look up each other's addresses).

Email
All MedWeb contracts include mail hosting for certain number of email addresses. Our mail server is "mail.med-web.com", for both outgoing (SMTP) mail and incoming (POP3) mail. You can instead set up your own mail server if you wish, and we will route your mail to it. That way you can have as many email addresses as you want, but they will have to be of the form "@yourcompany.med-web.com" or "@yourdomain.com", rather than "@med-web.com".

Dial-up access
We have a limited number of 33.6K modems available for dial-up access to the MedWeb. Our server uses Caller-ID to allow calls only from specific numbers. If you want to put a modem on your own computer (at your office) and dial-up directly to it, please let us know, as that can potentially compromise the security of the entire MedWeb.

Usenet news
The Med-Web does not maintain a news server, but our ISP allows our customers to access theirs. The name "news.med-web.com" will always refer to a news server that can be used by MedWeb customers. (Currently, "news.med-web.com" is just another name for "news-b.gte.net". But we recommend using "news.med-web.com".)