Dial Up Network extension

[Ted Hilts <p-thilts telusplanet net>]

This is a 3 part question.

Part 1:
When adding a network dial up extension (where the network machine is
remote to the network and must dial up to get onto the network) can this
incoming dial up connection be handled by the same machine which handles
the internet Interface for the LAN network without compromising the
Internet connection speed.  I have been told that if there are two ppp
ports active at the same time on the sme machine then the fastest speed
of any of the two is the speed of the slowest.  So this would mean that
if ppp0 normally ran at X rate when handling Internet traffic, and if
ppp1 was active at Y rate (being slower than X) then ppp0 would be
forced to also run at Y rate????

Part 2:
Does anyone know of or has used a hardware solution that will
automatically handle 2 to 4 dial up connections and route them to a
network hub or LAN connection point so the dial up connection occurs
transparent to the network (LAN) computers.  This means that if a dial
up occurs to this device the entire process of interconnection to the
local network is transparent to any other machine on the network and so
connected there these remote dial up machines become part of the network
collection of machines?????

Part 3: (two questions)
Where is recent HOWTO information on configuring a Linux machine, both
hardware and software to be the kind of interface as explained in Part 2
above and does this require more power than available in a dedicated
486x66 machine configured just for that purpose????

Thanks for any help.

Bye-thanks_TED