Increasing connections while server is running?

[Greg_E]

I tried a quick search, but either didn't find what I'm looking for, or I used a poor choice of keywords.

Here's what I need help with...

At school we have a connection that is mostly tapped out during the day, and mostly empty at night. So I would like to be able to run with only a few connections (200?) during the day, and then increase to 1000 or more at night, and then go back to only a few connections the next day. I could do this with a scheduled task by killing the first server, and starting the second, and the opposite in the morning, but that would require disconnecting any current listeners.

What I would like to be able to do is simply increase the number of permitted connections at the correct time, and then decrease that at another time. Is there an easy way to do this? Do I need to set up a relay server to handle this, and can I use the same computer to run both the primary and relay servers?

I'm running on win2000 server with sp4 installed and I have the incoming stream on one NIC, and the outgoing stream on a second NIC with a different IP (this bridges the intranet to the internet and helps prevent anyone from hijacking my shoutcast server). I am using the AAC+ codec from Orban's Opticodec. The computer is a Via Epia EK10000 with a 1Ghz C7 processor(Luke core) and 512MB ram and misc. hard disk. Live content is all this machine will be doing. Encoding is handled on a different machine.

Thanks, Greg.