beefy RS/6000 router story [long]

From: William Donzelli <aw288_at_osfn.org>
Date: Wed Feb 6 11:27:01 2002

> Oh YES! ...enss230.digex.net was one of those. We had an NSFnet T1
> for a long while, it came up in March of 1993. That was one FAST
> router. The thing that bugged me about it was that it was HUGE...or
> rather, the rack it was in was huge. It was a desktop box, about rack
> width and maybe 6" tall, but they put it in an extended-width short
> rack about the size of a washing machine.

OK, that was one of the small ones. "ENSS", for those uninformed, means
"End Node Switching System". The T3Bs (the backbone machines with HSSI
and FDDI) were "CNSS"s, or "Core Node Switching System". I think all ENSS
machines had either ethernet or V.35 cards. ENSSs with T3s did not come
until later, maybe after the RS/6000 era.

> We got fed up with it taking up so much space in our tiny computer
> room that we took it all apart during a config window and re-racked it
> in one of our nice compact Sun racks.

One thing I must say about the ANS idea of racking up equipment is that
is was completely fscked. Basically, there was no planning. Pound to fit
and paint to match.

> We weren't given accounts on the machine. We were a bunch of
> old-school hacker types, every one of us paranoid having come from the
> defense industry, and we couldn't stand the idea of the ANS guys
> running this Unix box on our network that we didn't have access
> to...and we knew it was their NOC's procedure to dial into it, log in,
> and check the logs if the machine ever went down. So one day we
> rigged up a serial sniffer between the machine and the modem, and
> power-cycled it...waited 'til they dialed in, and sniffed the root
> password. It pained us to do that to a running unix machine, but hey,
> it got us access to the machine.

I'm telling*.

Actually, the old-timer ANS guys were pretty much in the same boat as you
- a bunch of old-school hacker types and ex-IBM lab geeks. Very few
suits. The suits came in when Bernie bought ANS.

> Those RS960 cards were the first production router interfaces (on ANY
> router) that could route a T3 at full speed, if memory serves.

Until the later Ciscos, I think those routers were the fastest around.

> Firing up nslookup just now, I find enss230.digex.net is still in DNS
> at its original IP address...an "A" record that I myself put into the
> nameserver tables nine years ago.

If you were on the list about four (?!) years ago, you could have had one
of the routers for free. I had the job of scrapping them out (for some
reason the ones that did not get saved for RCS/RI, some freinds, myself,
and TCMHC ended up in a warehouse in Hopewell Junction, NY). I still have
lots of the parts. I have a lot of docs pulled out of the dumpster, and
will have to look for ENSS230.
 
*Seriously, can I post this to the X-ANS list? There probably are a few
of us that remember your antics (not me, I was probably building up AOL
racks for ANS at the time back in Chicago).

William Donzelli
aw288_at_0osfn.org
Received on Wed Feb 06 2002 - 11:27:01 GMT