More stories about stacks of modems(rachelbythebay.com)
rachelbythebay.com
More stories about stacks of modems
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/03/14/modems/
4 comments
Livingston Portmasters? I know getting multilink PPP channels working with those to Linux was a big deal.
Nah, Portmasters were actually pretty cool. The brand that caught fire, was a briefly-very-popular one that had ISDN-2 routers that had the charming feature of having proxy-ARP turned on by default (so that all traffic on your LAN would egress over that ISDN link...) as well as ISDN-30 rackmounts that, well, melted down when too many people dialed in at the same time.
This brings me back. In the late '90's, I interned at Sun Microsystems with the team responsible for the ISDN infrastructure that enabled people to work from home. My job was to automate modem SW upgrades for modems in racks in data centers and for remote users. The latter group was more challenging to serve since the upgrade could only run when they were connected and and "breaking" something killed their internet connection - it happened a couple times :(
In the early days of the internet, this is what pretty much every ISP looked like. The author doesn't seem to like their USR ISDN solution very much, but it was pretty much the best you could get at the time.
I forget the brand of the kit that actually caught fire, but that was definitely something that was happening for real in the data closets of the period. My employer at the time was using Cisco 5500s, which had to be upgraded to 5600s (or was it 5700s?) pretty quickly, due to the potato-like qualities of the CPU and RAM on the former model, and the rapid increase in modem speeds.
Good times? Maybe... We've definitely come a long way since the start of the century, and despite all the hand-wringing around "tech stagnation", turning up a 10Gb/s link these days is definitely more enjoyable than getting a T1 or E2 link to do its thing at the time...