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I love seeing stuff like this. Though I'd be a happy man if I never had to see the words "Veritas Volume Manager" again. Definitely one of my least favorite pieces of software from that era. I worked for a company around this same time that had servers in the NJ Exodus data center. Used to have to head up there once a month to swap out tapes in the Sun L11000.
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At least a couple of the Dyn datacenters had dialup for out-of-band access back in 2013, think its all Ethernet now.
Dial up lines are still available in some datacenters, had some both for services and for OOB access as recent as 2015 (San Jose)
Does anyone know of an article like this about the dial in modem systems and infrastructure for some of the early dialup services?
https://www.patton.com/technotes/build_yourself_an_isp.pdf
http://www.gwi.net/behind-the-scenes-of-a-90s-internet-start...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8352432
The absolute minimum, and representative of the very first dial-up ISPs: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2025
http://www.datamation.com/erp/article.php/615281/My-own-priv...
There used to be a lot of nice material on this subject but a lot of it has been obsolete and rotted away from the web over the last 15-20 years. The larger dial-up ISPs used Cisco AS series boxes (or equivalent) with PRI (i.e.: phone over T1) connections (24 lines/each) to a centralized RADIUS server for authentication. They are/were the last hold outs providing dial up.
Smaller ISPs were more of a '94 to '99 thing. Usually they used cyclades or equivalent serial port cards with up to 16 serial ports per card and an external modem per port. Eventually this morphed into boxes with multiple modems in them and access servers that did the ppp termination and the authentication (to a RADIUS server) as scale increased. US Robotics was probably the best reputed player in the modem space.
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Brought back some memories for me as well. In corporate IT, unix sysadmins had to know how to manage multiple different hardware architectures and operating systems that all did things different. AIX, Solaris, HPUX, Ultrix, etc, all with different filesystems, raid hw/sw, command paths, and so on. That picture of the ethernet hornet's nest too. Ugh. At least it wasn't AUI cabling.
Indeed. AUI was a killer. We had a policy of turning it into 10base2 right away with an adaptor, then 10baseT when that became a thing. I liked this era so much I used to skip dive all the kit that was chucked out. Had myself a nice stacked Sun 1000E as a desktop in 1999, until I got the electricity bill. Must have cost as much as a house when it was new. Then I found HP/UX was horrid. Had a run in with some HP N-cla…
I do remember some $100k - $300k invoices for larger SMP servers from HP, Sun, and the like. For machines that probably had less overall horsepower than my current cell phone :)
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Dial up lines are still available in some datacenters, had some both for services and for OOB access as recent as 2015 (San Jose)
Lots of companies still have inbound dialin access for EDI stuff still running on POS systems from the 1990s. It's scary really.
Does anyone know of an article like this about the dial in modem systems and infrastructure for some of the early dialup services?
A typical configuration would terminate the analogue lines over ISDN, which supported somewhere up to 30 B channels ('voice calls') over a single cable, running alongside one or two Ethernet cables to a single router with one or more modem option cards installed.
We had Cisco boxes in the last place I worked that handled dialup, looking pretty much like this: http://www.ciscomax.com/datasheets/3600/Cisco_3640.jpg
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At least a couple of the Dyn datacenters had dialup for out-of-band access back in 2013, think its all Ethernet now.
Dial up lines are still available in some datacenters, had some both for services and for OOB access as recent as 2015 (San Jose)
"As you can imagine (and see from these pictures), this equates to a whole bunch of ethernet cables. Cable management gets increasingly difficult to grasp each time a new box is added to the mix " Eeeeeek. I'm not in IT and I got the sinking stomach feeling when looking at this. Thankfully there is https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn/ to cure that.
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Indeed. AUI was a killer. We had a policy of turning it into 10base2 right away with an adaptor, then 10baseT when that became a thing. I liked this era so much I used to skip dive all the kit that was chucked out. Had myself a nice stacked Sun 1000E as a desktop in 1999, until I got the electricity bill. Must have cost as much as a house when it was new. Then I found HP/UX was horrid. Had a run in with some HP N-cla…
>>Must have cost as much as a house when it was new. I do remember some $100k - $300k invoices for larger SMP servers from HP, Sun, and the like. For machines that probably had less overall horsepower than my current cell phone :)
It had about as much go as one of those "big slab" xeon slot CPUs at the time which was 1/10th of the cost.
