5 Feb
2002
5 Feb
'02
4:08 p.m.
On February 5, William Donzelli wrote:
Once in a Blue Moon, you might come across an RS/6000
with a strange tag
(6611 Network Processor, I think). They are basically Powerserver 220 and
320 machines, but with the V.35 and Ethernet cards. Sometimes these cards
are still installed. Grab them at all costs. I have found them in these
before, at hamfests and junkyards. Nearly all of the early RS960s went back
to IBM, or were scrapped.
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. The set it in there on the
floor of the rack, VERTICALLY, with a U-shaped shroud around it. The
rack was mostly empty space! On top of it were the two 1U rackmount
Cylink CSU/DSUs (main and spare), an Exabyte tape drive, and a modem
for remote management.
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. :) When the IBM CE came out to
"maintain" the system we sent him away, pointing to a FEMA contract
that required us to restrict access to our computer room to
"authorized personnel", of which he wasn't one...so they never busted
us. When our contract ended and we had to return the machine, we
hastily reassembled it back into its [huge] glory and gave it back to
them at the door. :)
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.
Those RS960 cards were the first production router interfaces (on ANY
router) that could route a T3 at full speed, if memory serves.
We had to set up a local router on the ethernet to BGP peer with that
RS/6000 as part of our agreement with ANS for the T1. Our company was
DIRT poor; we couldn't afford a Cisco (lots of hand-waving and
trickery got us the ANS T1 for free for many, many months thanks to
the brilliant guy who was running the company) so we built out a
SPARCstation-2 and loaded up NetBSD/sparc 0.9 (I *think* it was
v0.9)...ran gated on it...and peered it up with enss230. It worked
like a champ, with 9,000 routes in the routing table, and never
crashed. It was amazing!
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.
Anyway, sorry for being a windbag...I first moved to the DC area in
the beginning of 1993 to "do that Digex thing" and now I've recently
moved away; kinda the "end of an era" for me and a major part of my
life.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
St. Petersburg, FL "Less talk. More synthohol." --Lt. Worf