People asking for help and then rejecting advice

[jgreco]

EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! EEEXXXTTTTEERRRMIIINATE!!!

Excellent, a Time Lord reference.

I am missing "Computer Networks" from Tanenbaum

Along with a copy of Minix I suppose. Shelf's only so big.

[awesome Dalek poster]

But that, that takes the cake. I took down my wall a few years back intending to reset it with a bunch of newer stuff, got about partway, and you can see I kinda stopped. The walls in my office are largely decorated with PCB's from various gear, Sun workstation boards, Nortel PBX boards, APC UPS boards, ethernet switch boards, various PC mainboards, boards that have burned, etc. I like making an office environment that is fun to visit and interesting to talk about. Most of the stuff has a story behind it. But some of it's just stuff I thought was cool. I have to think about seeing if that Dalek poster is available as a print... note to self

 

[ChrisRJ]

Arg, and a chassis Multi-Tech MODEM bank. MNP Level 4 or 5 anyone?
(You get a ring of power if you can correctly understand that reference... of course, a certain Grinch is not eligible.)

Wasn't MNP4 about error correction and MNP5 the former plus compression?

I started with this in December 1992 and doubled the phone bill (to my parents' great pleasure)

Edit: @jgreco , and I still have my Minix binder somewhere ;-)

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Seems someone is missing the other 2 books from Stevens.

 

[jgreco]

I think the thread at

Multiple interfaces on same subnet

So I really don't understand this at all. There is absolutely no technical reason for not being able to have multiple interfaces on the same subnet, regardless of they are serving the same service or not. I mean really, there's no reason why I can't have two iSCSI initiators in the same subnet...

www.truenas.com

is a poster child for a variation on the theme of this thread.

In 2014, I was already very tired of combative know-it-alls trying to "correct" me (I prefer Steve Hofstetter's "trying to incorrect me"), often talking about concepts they clearly didn't have any mastery of, on the topic of multiple interfaces on the single subnet. I even say

I do not wish to entertain a debate as to whether or not this is "right" or "wrong." It is the way that modern UNIX systems work, and such debate would be pointless.

But apparently it is too hard for people, in the year 2022, in the era of massive resources, to pull up a VM and test their dumb incorrect ideas before posting about it. I am reminded of "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt".

I tire of alternative facts that are only true in someone's imagination. It is exhausting. Are they just trolling? Are they teachable? Where's the cutoff?

 

[jgreco]

chassis Multi-Tech MODEM bank. MNP Level 4 or 5 anyone?

That's actually a statistical multiplexer, though it's hard to tell from the angle. All the Multitech stuff sorta had that same styling for awhile.

 

[jgreco]

Wasn't MNP4 about error correction and MNP5 the former plus compression?

I started with this in December 1992 and doubled the phone bill (to my parents' great pleasure)

Edit: @jgreco , and I still have my Minix binder somewhere ;-)

I sadly made the mistake of getting rid of many old treasures from the early years. Now I'm sad. heh.

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

Arg, and a chassis Multi-Tech MODEM bank. MNP Level 4 or 5 anyone?
(You get a ring of power if you can correctly understand that reference... of course, a certain Grinch is not eligible.)

I never had a modem bank, but at one point I had a Telebit Netblazer with some Telebit modems and I think at least one Multitech as well. I am sure I have my UUCP modemcap entries for that around somewhere if you would like them.

 

[Arwen]

Wasn't MNP4 about error correction and MNP5 the former plus compression?

I started with this in December 1992 and doubled the phone bill (to my parents' great pleasure)

Edit: @jgreco , and I still have my Minix binder somewhere ;-)

Looks like you get a Nazgul Ring of Power!

The company I worked for many, MANY years ago, had a bank of Microcom MODEMs with MNP Level 5, (aka Microcom Networking Protocol). For us software developers, they would pay us thousands for home computers, with the caveat that it had to connect to work. I already had a fancy computer, and MODEM, but it was a crappy MODEM. So I bought a Multi-tech 2400 baud MODEM with MNP level 4. Shortly after, a firmware update to MNP level 5 was made available, which I flashed to the MODEM. I routinely used 9600 bps to connect to that MODEM, to make sure I could get maximum speed, (it's handshaked to prevent buffer overflow).

That off loading of errror correction & compression over MODEM set the stage for decent, reliable Internet at home. Later I used that same computer & MODEM for SLIP, then Compressed SLIP, and of course, later PPP.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Looks like you get a Nazgul Ring of Power!
[..]
I routinely used 9600 bps to connect to that MODEM, to make sure I could get maximum speed, (it's handshaked to prevent buffer overflow).

The fine difference between baud and bps. Speaking about more than 2400 bps: I desoldered a 16450 UART to replace it with a 16550 once I got my used 14k4 Twincom modem. The only way to avoid line drops. I sometimes miss those days!

And thanks for the ring

 

[Constantin]

Being able to recognize the warbles of a modem handshake will date us!

 

[jgreco]

I never had a modem bank, but at one point I had a Telebit Netblazer with some Telebit modems and I think at least one Multitech as well. I am sure I have my UUCP modemcap entries for that around somewhere if you would like them.

I still have the multiport serial card I ripped out of blaze.mscs.mu.edu (a Netblazer) when it was decommissioned. I used to run two of the area's four major UUCP hubs. Fun days.

I desoldered a 16450 UART to replace it with a 16550

Wow, if I were more ambitious I would snap a picture of the "Evolution of Serial" section of the wall which has ended up mostly behind my office TV. I've got a bunch of 4 port and 8 port 8250, 16450, 16550, 16560, and maybe some vendor cards, mostly dating from the ISA days. My office is sort of crazy-town.

 

[Samuel Tai]

Being able to recognize the warbles of a modem handshake will date us!

This was a little before my time, but my Dad worked on his master's at Washington University in St. Louis on a old PDP-11 with direct serial connections to separate terminals for punching cards, reading cards, and printing output. I remember that lab was full of ASCII art on the walls.

 

[jgreco]

Being able to recognize the warbles of a modem handshake will date us!

Recognize? I could whistle a 110/300 baud carrier. That wasn't a particularly unique skill at the time though.

 

[jgreco]

Wow, if I were more ambitious I would snap a picture of the "Evolution of Serial" section of the wall which has ended up mostly behind my office TV. I've got a bunch of 4 port and 8 port 8250, 16450, 16550, 16560, and maybe some vendor cards, mostly dating from the ISA days. My office is sort of crazy-town.

Where are your BocaBoard 16's, Grinch?

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

Where are your BocaBoard 16's, Grinch?

Prior to the Netblazer, I think it was a Comtrol Rocketport card with 16450's. Man, we are taking a ride in the way back machine!

 

[jgreco]

Prior to the Netblazer, I think it was a Comtrol Rocketport card with 16450's. Man, we are taking a ride in the way back machine!

The Comtrol stuff was gorgeous but so... damn... expensive.

Ok so this picture totally sucks because most of it is behind the TV. I had to throw a light down low to illuminate and it shadows terribly. Camera flash just resulted in blindingly bright chrome flashback.

The top left is a 16550A card that came with 16550's from different mfrs. "!!??!!"

The Gtek card is 8250's. Gtek still operates a website even though Katrina wiped them out in 2005. <Quake3 voice> "Impressive".

Next to that is a BocaBoard 8, then a dead DSL modem and an exploded APC network management card. Yes this is not well organized. The guts of an APC UPS that angered me and a random 3Ware RAID card are mixed in for wall space reasons.

The SIIG 16650 card that ran some of my high speed UUCP with FreeBSD for years, below that is a Cyclades 8Yo card that needed a breakout cable. That was my choice over the Comtrol Rocketport stuff. Next comes a DigiBoard 8 port with 16450's, which I believe was what was in the Netblazer, and then Dennis from ETINC's sync serial card. I was making routers out of FreeBSD for upstream connectivity to the Internet, and terminal servers out of FreeBSD for UUCP, SLIP, and PPP, during those pre-commerical and early commercial days of the Internet, and the stuff was great, but of course there were practical limits. You couldn't get past maybe 100 dialup lines before it became impractical, at which point clients typically found an all-in-one terminal server solution like the PortMaster 3 or USR Total Control products.

One of my clients, ExecPC, however, did wind up with 1200 (!) lines of dialup on discrete USR Courier v.Everything modems wired up to PortMaster 2's. The article I have tacked to my wall that says "The Internet" --

View attachment 53650

shows Greg Ryan in front of a literature organizer assembly which was used to hold 120 Courier modems.

ExecPC had this down to a science, and had used a large transformer to power a busbar along the back of two 60-slot literature organizers, with 4x PM2E30's on top, a modem in each slot, and they snipped off the wall warts, using the supplied cable for power. A vertical board was added over the top so that the rears of the PM2s were exposed, and the board provided a mounting point for an ethernet hub and three Amp RJ21 breakouts. This gave you a modem "pod" that held 120 USR Courier 56K modems, neatly cabled and easily serviced. The only thing coming to each of these racks was 3x AMP RJ21, 1x power, and 1x ethernet.

They had ten of these handling their 1200 (one thousand two hundred!) modems before it got unmanageable, and part of that was that US Robotics offered a deal that allowed them to be a testing site for Total Control.

At which point they promptly had a guy solder all the wall warts back on to the power leads and proceeded to sell them at a good percentage of
original price to new Internet users.

The other problem was that they were getting near two full DS3's worth of analog lines being delivered this way, and it was taking up a TON of
space. A full "pod" could be reduced to 3x USR TC's, so two whole pods could be replaced with a single rack of gear.

 

[Papa]

Guys! Thanks for the walk down memory lane! Been there - done that, Got the TEE Shirt.

And don't worry about those that crap all over your advice after they asked for it, you know your right, let them make the mistakes after you give the answers. I'm at the stage in my life where I have seen this for years, and my shoulders get a lot of exercise when I shrug them and go about my day. You're a sharp group - keep up the good work. As Mark Minasi @ TechMentor used to say "Always use your skills for good - never evil".

 

[awasb]

That's Star Wars ... isn't it?

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

US Robotics offered a deal that allowed them to be a testing site for Total Control

I remember we got a 4 or 8 line unit of these and users' PPP connections were frequently dropped. Turned out it was a particular bit pattern in the transferred data (no, not "+++ATH", but fundamentally something like this). Instead of fixing the issue in their firmware we got our money back and that particular product was discontinued.

Took me a couple of days to find out. I saw the light when one user provided me with the information that "every time I transfer THIS file via FTP, I'm disconnected". I then bisected the binary file down to 100 bytes or so, threw that at their support, and they binned the product. Weird.

Then Telebit came along with the Netblazer and "MICA" modems and we could do ISDN and analog on the same digital E1 line. That department was subsequently bought/wooed away by Cisco - which was probably one of the contributing factors to the end of Telebit. The technology ended up in these puppies.

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

Then Telebit came along with the Netblazer and "MICA" modems and we could do ISDN and analog on the same digital E1 line.

The big thing with the Telebit's was that the modems were aware of the UUCP/g protocol so they would fake ACKs to the sending host so it would send data at a higher rate. It buffered the data until the real ACK was received. It would also shift channels so more of the bandwidth to be used by the prevailing direction of the traffic. They could also work around noise and stay connected when other modems wouldn't connect. Yes, there was a day when could have easily been considered a Telebit fanboy.

The analog or digital devices were a wonder. I set up a number of those. Most were Cisco, but I did some from Ascend too. Needless to say, you don't see those much any more.