Viewing profile — bwann

I've been running it the last year or two to get e-mail to a vintage DOS BBS that had a UUCP package. I was pleasantly surprised it was out of the box usable on both CentOS and Deb…

Vintage bulletin boards and running a retro UUCP network

The key is to use a non-compressed codec such as G.711u/a-law, and disable echo and silence suppression. I can regularly get 28.8k-33.6k carrier speeds across the US when using an …

I used the acme-dns server ( https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns ) for this. It's basically a mini DNS server with a very basic API backed with sqlite. All of my acme.sh instances t…

and V.35 and X.21!

Back in the ISP days of the 90s, if you used the Microsoft Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) and wanted to distribute customized versions of IE to your customers, one of …

Qmodem was my favorite comm program during the BBS days, and it still is today when working with vintage computers. It was just nice to use. Its scripting language was the first I …

These were pretty decent, not too terrible, and could be set up to dial normal ISPs. They filled a niche with older customers and/those who had zero computer experience but wanted …

truss, that's a command I haven't seen in a long time

I'm surprised there's no mention of QBasic that shipped with MS-DOS >= 5.0. This was built on top of EDIT.COM, and while it only ran a BASIC interpreter instead of compiling an exe…

Traffic to vs through a router; both UDP and ICMP probes to a given hop will both go to the control plane which can be rate limited or handled by a general purpose CPU. Probes to h…

Trivia: 32,768 + 666 is the usual starting port of most implementations

+1 for this, I always recommend ras' tutorials at NANOG. He goes into a lot of detail people just hand wave over or don't even consider

Usually this meant the new neighborhood was put behind a subscriber loop carrier (SLC) which added an extra analog/digital conversion. Voice calls were getting digitized locally, s…

To nitpick, the 53.3k limit only affected US Robotics' pre-V.90 standard called X2, due to how much power they would require, which violated FCC rules. K56Flex (the competing 56k p…

There's still a decent community of people running them either for nostalgia and/or bringing them into the Internet area. Some are telnet/ssh only, some have actual dial-up modems …

In my younger times I used to go to a lot of livestock auctions with the family. There was always a goat just casually standing by next to the egress gate of the arena to lead thes…

I recently tried this for making a YT video using an ATA with a USR Courier dialing into a ISP's POP in San Jose. V.92 flat out didn't work for me, but V.90 did. Surprisingly I was…

Most people tended to use their own ISP's mail servers back then. Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL were the only third-party email services around, before the likes of Gmail took off. It wo…

As an small ISP owner in the 90s, there was no way to win. Incoming phone lines were a considerable hunk of your expenses so you wanted to have enough available at peak time in the…

Using a hostname will be an improvement, but not perfect. It's going to depend on the firewall implementation whether it resolves the hostname to IP address one time and remembers …

many of my teenage years were spent downloading the "A" set of floppies over 28.8k modem, until I befriended somebody at a university who downloaded the whole thing to a QIC tape a…

Yes, but sometimes you can break your configuration management in such a way that it can't recover and need a rapid way to fix things or see the state of the world. It's very handy…

I shot the F9 SSO-A launch with my FLIR One back in December. Visually it was about the same as yours, but what was surprising how well the iPhone picked up the low frequency rumbl…

Your friends already know what your phone number is