CABLETRON: Early 90s networking hubs

[@MichaelKrygeris]

Worked at cabletron from 1995-2000. A couple corrections. Spectrum was very different from Spectrum Elememt Manager[SPEL]. So the price difference is due to that. Also, you can reset the NVRAM on most devices by flipping switch 6 on the dip switch and powering on. Another thing is these devices support all 9 groups of RMON. So you can get an insane amount of data down to the port level. EMME was ETHERNET Management Module for Ethernet. Remember that these things were designed for multiple networking protocols. So this was the result of a planned naming convention.

[@theserialport]

Thank you for the info!

[@MichaelKrygeris]

@@theserialport one other detail I thought of. If you can find firmware for these devices, flip switch 7 and that should put the device in bootp mode. You can reflash these using a TFTP server. Between reloading the firmware and clearing NVRAM, it will fix 80% of strange issues

[@Jackpkmn]

@@MichaelKrygeris Exorcise the ghost in the machine by freaking erasing it. 🤣

[@clabretro]

the people need a cabletron token ring setup

[@AureliusR]

The people need a clabretro isp

[@IBM_Museum]

My Cabletron (Ethernet) switches are slightly newer than those shown - I'm looking for some similar Madge chassis that had Token-Ring modules.

[@raymondseeger4832]

The company I started my IT career with had a dozen floors and a number of warehouses of these (in token ring!) well into the mid 2000’s. They also had Windows NT far later than they should have too!

[@OpotamusChez]

Was really cool to see Cabletron's name again. A couple of friends and I skipped school and registered as a fake business to attend a networking trade show one time in the 90s, mainly to fill our bags with promotional products. Cabletron gave us free beer and pizza to attend a forum about ATM vs. Frame Relay. As a 13 year old kid this single act made the Cabletron brand about as cool to me as Run DMC or Led Zeppelin and I'm sorry they were gone by the time I was working with network gear in the 2000s

[@Jaxxex]

love to see a multi ring - token ring setup . In 95 i had 4 buildings with a token over fiber in the center and model 30 bridges in each building - something i will always remember, after learning the hard way via days of outage is: every ring must have a single cross over cable

[@josephdurnal]

My first real IT job, the main hub was a Cabletron. It was 1996. They had outgrown it and had a few random hubs connected to it. It was a very data heavy business for 1996 and the collision light was almost solid. One of my early tasks was getting things up to 100 megabit, which I did with an unmanaged switch and several hubs, all 3com I believe. While we were doing that, we partnered with another company for a big project, they brought their workstations to our office and none of them worked right on the network. That's when I learned about 100 base VG, they brought in their own switch and we bought a compatible card for one of our servers, that's also how I learned how to set up IPX routing in a Netware server, yes, from one of the many red books on the shelf. I wasn't even 20 yet, those were the days.

[@drdyno]

I worked for Simon Property Group in the mid 90's and we used lots of Cabletron equipment at all of the malls across the US.

[@warphammer]

I adminned a large Spectrum deployment (on Solaris/SPARC) in the 2000s. It was quite good - one of the two main proprietary managers (along with HP OpenView) to be good enough to be generally usable with any gear. The environment it was in was of course a previous Cabletron shop. I got there just after they went to an all Cisco network with routing - Cabletron encouraged a 'flat' network design which didn't work out well in practice. Spanning Tree elections taking down the whole network for ~30 seconds damps enthusiasm.

[@MichaelKrygeris]

The insane thing is that Spectrum has been sold off several times since enterasys spun it off. To my knowledge it is the only vestige of cabletron that has kept its original name. Somehow Aprisma was able to distance itself from Cabletron’s implosion. To this day I still believe it was the most advanced network management software ever made. Massively over-engineered like most things cabletron built.

[@warphammer]

@@MichaelKrygeris Yes. When Cabletron fractured, the Spectrum division became Aprisma. They were bought by Concord (another New England SNMP company that actually complemented them well) who was VERY shortly after gobbled up by CA. CA is now Broadcom, so....

[@Jonathan_O]

I always wondered what it was like to figure one of these old devices. They were a little before my time. PLEASE keep making these videos, loving them!

[@BigJimSportsCamper]

I remember the Cabletron Lan Van coming to our company HQ to show off the latest gear. I also remember the "Live Free or Die" motto on its New Hampshire licence plate.

[@HopelessAutistic]

Still has it

[@603Madison]

My father used to work for Cabletron when he was my age. And funny enough, the office I work at now is the former Cabletron headquarters!

[@adamb6646]

Ha! My family moved to NH when my father got a job at the Cabletron office.

[@MarcDBehr]

@@adamb6646 I remember that! Specially, since I'm the reason that you had a move to New Hampshire 😅

[@jroysdon]

Bay Networks was before my time, but I remember my Dad installing some at his work. I think the big deal was that they had a Bay Networks switch which would help with the transmission collisions. The only time I touched CableTron was in 19999 after a failure at a local PD's Detective's building. I was on call and show up, but I'd never seen them before. Get connected, I don't even remember the problem, but was able to diagnose it over the phone with my boss, swap out a card, and get them back up and running. That thing was ancient and replaced with Cisco not long after.

[@Myfatheredward]

I love the way you tell the story of the history with an easy to listen to Voice!

[@rayzinz5938]

A shoutout for Rochester, NH. 0:17 I drive past the old Cabletron building on my way to work daily. It was turned into a Stonewall Kitchen and has now been taken over by SIG.

[@MichaelKrygeris]

Yup. Those were known as “building 125” and “126”. Those were for warehouse, RMA, and finance. Engineering, sales and executive were bldg 28 and bldg35.

[@LosTCoz3000]

​@MichaelKrygeris SIG still uses the names 125 and 126. Where stonewall was is called stonewall now and added 127. Lol

[@rayzinz5938]

I didn't know that at all. I have a buddy who works for sig there too.

[@88tx]

9:05 the prefix 128.227.0.0/16 appears to be registered to University of Florida since 1987. interesting...

[@jroysdon]

Universities were assigned huge address ranges way back when.

[@LogicalNiko]

Back in the early days prior to 1997 you would email Jon and ask him for a new network. He would give pretty much any organization with the connectivity at least a class C (/24). That was the smallest network he would assign and they were generally thought to be “throw away” networks. Jon ran assignments in his spare time at UCLA and for most of the time just published the list of all networks in a text file available via UUCP and later FTP. You would just email and say something like “Jon, I’m so and so working on a network project/company that will use ## number of computers” and give your contact info. You would then get a class C for anything under 100 or so, or a larger network for anything in the 100-500 range. Anything over 1000 usually ended up getting questions about network topology and usage back. In the early to mid 90s they didn’t think people would ever really be dishonest about something as scientific and full as computer networking. Many of us in computer science at that time with access to university systems/labs would get /19-/23s assigned to us although we never really had the infrastructure to route them. Probably around 1999-2000 ARIN started enforcing fees and proper registration and very few of us had the foresight to shell out our own money each year to retain our IP address space.

[@LogicalNiko]

Keep in mind too until around 1994-2005 or so every PC on most university campuses had a public IP. Every student in a dorm room was really had a naked internet connection usually with a pretty good chunk of an OC-12 if not multiple aggregated ones. This is where peer to peer networking was born. We used to just publish our entire hard drive of games and music out there for anyone to grab, and eventually projects started to form to index the content and facilitate transferring it.

[@SammyV82]

Wow, I remember buying one of these MMAC-3FNB chassis from my university's surplus department back in like 2003. Glad to see someone still tinkering with them now.

[@bobblum5973]

I worked with a ton of different networking gear around that time. The 3Com PairTamer, sort of a coax-to-single pair adapter, passive, no power required. Catalyst switches before they were bought up by Cisco. Cisco HyBridge routers with a Multibus backplane. Almost everything DEC made, from PDP-11 based DECSA ("Pluto") terminal server / router (X.25) / gateway (IBM SNA), DECserver 100, 200, 250, 300, 500/550, 700-series, LANbridge 100, 150, 200, and more. The Good Old Days!

[@harleymcclure9802]

We used Cabletron in our first major Ethernet roll out. There was some token ring and thin net before, but this was our initial campus wide solution. They were pretty reliable, but when we migrated to Catalyst switches it was night and day.

[@MisterFastbucks]

Brings back memories. I spent many hours using and configuring these.

[@Jerrec]

A few days ago, I connected a IBM Stackable Ethernet Hub with 10Mbits to the Management port of a Mikrotik CRS502. The CRS502 got 4x 100Gbit QSFP28 and a 10/100 MGMT Port. It was kinda funny to transfer a file from through a 10Mbit hub to a 100Gbit connected Server. I also monitored it via Zabbix, but the SNMP Queries maxed out the Hub's CPU. 🙂 Great Video! I hope you can show more of those multi mode hubs!

[@retrobytes70]

Wow, this was some of my earliest networking, we had it in a large High School, with FDDI uplinks the works was a great product in its time, it had a monitoring system call Spectrum, that we ran on a Sparc station

[@theserialport]

Would love to find an old copy of Spectrum!

[@retrobytes70]

@@theserialport I wish I still had it, sadly I do not, it was an awesome system for the day, could send you a page you if there was an alarm, BUT it was soooo expensive to run or upgrade, we changed over to HP TopTools, was so much cheaper. We were 100% Apple Macintosh's through out, and I believe we had Caymen Gator Routers with specific AppleTalk Cable Ranges to break up the Chooser for printers/shares etc. Good memories for sure

[@PlaywithJunk]

I remember these things. They were very useful for media conversion but much too big for a small workshop. I still have some Cabletron single port media converters... 🙂

[@JimmerofOz]

I had exposure to a number of the Cabletron Smart Stack switches in the early 2000's - we ended up getting some cheap because Cabletron disappeared - great gear for its day

[@TastyBusiness]

This is fascinating to watch, I'm curious to see more of these byzantine networking devices.

[@AttilaSVK]

I recall having a multimedia network in the school which I attended between 2000 and 2004. The computer room had some newer Slot 1 Celeron machines with 10/100 Ethernet cards, and some older Pentium systems (namely some Compaq Deskpro 2000s and a few HP NetServer E30s used as regular computers) which had NICs with 10base2 interface. There was a simple hub (maybe made by SMC, but I'm not sure) which had a single BNC port and 8 or so RJ45 ports. The 10base2 computers were connected with T couplers, the rest had individual Cat5 cables. The incoming internet connection speed was 512kbit/s, pretty snappy for the time, but if all 16 computers were online, it was pretty slow. Later (at my advice) they bought a 100 megabit switch, and kept using the hub only as a media converter, with one RJ45 port connected to the switch. That made a significant difference, and was in use until I left the school in 2004.

[@LB4FH]

Actually learned something I use on modern equipment now, what DSR/DTR means 😁 So cool to see that modern equipment has links all the way back to the old terminals. Great video as always

[@stonent]

I worked at a pharmaceutical company in IT from 2000 to 2001 and we had the Cabletron chassis systems there. We used the octopus cables that interfaced with the patch panels like you described. Some parts of our network had transitioned to Cisco equipment but our research building was still on Cabletron I think.

[@yanndiy]

My very first hub was a second hand cabletron mr9t, which I took around for early days LANs (in my days) to play warcraft2, duke3d, doom and quake. Fond memories of being the only properly working hub, and being a major upgrade from coax :) I had a second one which stayed at home, and was replaced much later on by a second hand blackbox ethernet switch 100Mbps. Quite the upgrade.

[@timdawg53]

Back in college I had a Cabletron 24 port 10Base-T Smart Switch 2200 that I bought cheap on eBay to connect our PCs in the dorm so we could play LAN games like Counter-Strike.

[@timbeard8457]

Excellent video! I joined Cabletron in presales just as the MMAC plus was launched. Can't remember any of the details, but it was a hulking lump compared to the MMACs. Re Spectrum, the two things i remember about it are (1) the key selling feature was being able to work out where a network break has occurred so that you only received errors from the linking unit and not everything behind it and (2) they apparently employed an army of developers just to create the modules for all of the non-Cabltron network gear. Final thought: Bob was apparently just as bad as the stories say! The culture was not great

[@kc0eks]

Love seeing the old network gear running.

[@ErisTheCatgirl]

God stuff like this is why I have notifications on, great work as always!

[@snapsetup]

I just found a Cabletron Smart Switch Router 2000 in a long-forgotten rack at work recently. It wasn't on, but does power on. I tried to get in via serial and it didn't work, but I should double-check the pinouts after watching this.

[@DECcomputers]

It's interesting to note that Cabeltron bought Digital's (DEC) networking division in 1997 and continued the networking equipment brand. I've got a DEChub 900 module from after 2000 with the Digital brand made by Cabletron (or one of the successors)

[@RandomTechWZ]

Early networking products are very fascinating. It must have been kinda exciting/frustrating being a network admin/engineer back in the day.

[@robertclark8351]

Had a Cabletron chassis with a Cisco module in it. Cisco swore up and down this did not exist, after their falling out with Cabletron.

[@LegoTux]

Had one of those in my college computer labs MMAC-8 chassis, it was quite the Unicorn. I think it was a Cisco IGS or IRM card.

[@jfbeam]

Yeah, Cisco loves to rewrite history. Just like the "AS21" USR TC card I have. (Cisco 2500 on a card that fits in TotalControl modem chassis. It passes through to the back panel, and gets power from the chassis, but that's about as integrated as it got.)

[@jroysdon]

Yeah, Cisco had a number of OEM-like deals with folks even up into the early 2000s.

[@1anwrang13r]

This video is great but it's been a weird juxtaposition. I remember when Cabletron launched these and, at the time, they were really capable bits of kit. By contrast, I've spent this week learning about EVPN-VXLAN datacentre fabrics which is a level of complexity, performance and flexibility that would have been absolutely inconceivable back in the early 90s. It's quite scary to think about what networks will look like in another 30 years.

[@MrMarci878]

Sometimes it feels like you can’t keep up with learning about all the new stuff with how fast it comes (and sometimes goes)

[@rnts08]

Less than 15 years ago, 10GbE and early infiniband was insane in the DC. Funny that most of the net is still built on trust with bgp4. 😅

[@1anwrang13r]

@@MrMarci878 That's true enough. I remember learning quite a lot about ATM LAN Emulation in the mid-90s but it then disappeared off the market before I ever got round to actually implementing it!

[@locnar1701]

We had these hubs in my first job, and oh boy were they both reliable and bothersome to deal with. Oh, and fun thing, a length of around 2-3 feet of thick net cable was great for a melee weapon... Just FYI

[@Torbjorn.Lindgren]

13:30 - Given that it's a HUB there's no way it's going to have traffic per port, that fundamentally requires it to be, well, NOT a hub but a switch/multi-port bridge/router. Or more precisely, each of the four "ports" (A/B/C/D) is a hub.

[@MichaelKrygeris]

Indeed, it does! They support 9 groups of RMON and there are counters for each port. There is a dedicated cpu just for management. The emme is actually a switch that connects the hub backplane ports. These things were insanely over-engineered and were built like tanks. I found a thin-net hub in the ceiling of a manufacturing plant, still running a few years ago!

[@colinstu]

This is neat AF! Looking forward to whatever you have coming next! Gonna deep dive into Allied Telesis' history / products?

[@JonathanSwiftUK]

Well thicknet was backbone, with Vampire taps, often running in a riser up the building, with thin net to each device, often with terminator resistors everywhere. The thin net could be run around the edge of a room, and you could connect in to this loop of cable.

[@HammondOfTexas0]

@theserialport we still have a few cabletron things laying around the office that are about to be thrown out if you have any interest in them (an rj21 cable and a couple token ring adapters)

[@franklincerpico7702]

You guys are amazing!!!

[@808jpm]

Since it's a repeater (hub) those ports might not have full statistics (around 13:20). It would be nice if there were receive or error counters per port. Maybe time to get a 3Com SuperStack II hub from the mid 90s and check out their SNMP counters. Back in the day I remember having HP OpenView with a plugin to manage the 3Com SuperStack II gear all running on a Sun Ultra 1 with Solaris 2.5.1.

[@zadrik1337]

I ran Cableton Spectrum in the 90's. It was excellent for its time. An Extreme engineer (Extreme bought Enterasys or became, not sure) I know says that CDP stands for Cabletron Discovery Protol not Cisco Discovery Protocol as I had always thought. The precursor to LLDP.

[@nickwallette6201]

Wow. I would not be mad if vendors went back to using chonky 24-pair connectors instead of RJ45 jacks. The next time I have to replace an EX3400-48P because of a PoE controller failure, I'll be thinking about how much nicer the job would be if I could just unplug a few Centronics connectors instead of keeping track of 48 UTP ends that all look exactly the same.

[@jfbeam]

Those things died out in the Cat5E days. It's hard to make trunks that meet the signal requirements. The RJ21 cables I still have are only CAT3.

[@drstefankrank]

Maybe at some point in time, we'll have all fibre with MPO connectors to LC panels or similar. It's just a bit difficult for PoE at the moment. In the meantime, you can work with 802.1X or MAC based VLANs and just have all ports configured the same.

[@nickwallette6201]

@@jfbeam Oh I know. They were inherited from the telephone guys for easy runs to a punchdown block, so CAT3 made perfect sense. But in theory, CAT5E ought to be doable, and would be enough for 1Gb. And I am going to die on the hill that, if you need 10Gb, you should be using fiber. ;-)

[@dankomancer]

I want to see more on the 10BASET or the coax, how that stuff worked. Did they modulate/demodulate the signal off the coax into ethernet for every terminal?

[@ScottDuensing]

We used these at the State of Illinois. My fondest memory? Some political appointed moron browsing porn, infecting his machine, and taking down the state-wide network. We yanked all the cards out of the Cabletron unit to stop it from infecting our local network and then had to manually rebuild all the systems that were hit before we stopped it. Ah, good times.

[@leeizme]

this is how i imagine comcast’s data centers look

[@captainsunshine918]

You guys rock!

[@Luix]

How cool with blades.

[@tylerljohnson]

Hey! That's my multimeter!

[@factus6]

remember the Racal-Datacom prem 5000? I think it was the same hardware just rebranded

[@johncavanaugh6481]

You need to do something on Synoptics Lattisnet

[@bobblum5973]

Ah, yes, Unshielded Twisted Pair Ethernet before 10Base-T! I remember having to agree to a non-disclosure agreement so we could evaluate and later buy and use the Lattisnet gear. Their later gear was 10Base-T compliant.

[@theserialport]

This miiight be coming sooner than later!

[@bobblum5973]

@@theserialport I just started to remember bits and pieces of things, like the LattisHub. And long after we'd switched to other 10Base-T gear we still used the LattisNet fiber optic transceivers in pairs at each end of an existing fiber run, to save the cost of running new fiber or UTP.

[@johncavanaugh6481]

I was a 19 yo intern at Nortel back in 89. I was fortunate to be at the early stages of modern networking. I learned about the very early Cisco terminal servers, routers, thin net, lattisnet and Unix admin. All that knowledge has served me well in my engineering career over the years.

[@notathome13]

No cabletron but kalpana catalyst switches with 10base2 and 10baseT which could do full duplex! We know where catalyst model ended up!

[@john.smith.noname]

CABLETRON SSR の広告はよく見た覚えがあるなぁ。

[@lenOwOo]

it really roars

[@vinatron8075]

You know what’s funny my 16/4 Rings use cabletron MAUs

[@systemchris]

I wonder what the management software looked like

[@trackvbwrx]

Where are you located? I have a lot of Headend stuff you may be interested in, you could haul it all away free of charge for getting it out of my headend

[@trackvbwrx]

Also very old CATV amplifiers from the field I’d be more than happy to give you to make content.

[@robsyoutube]

I ripped one of these out once from a customers. This thing was total junk compared to even cisco's offerings at the time.

[@Codeaholic1]

I worked with these in the late 90s and replaced them with Nortel gear. Cabketron was by far the worst gear we had.

[@jroysdon]

Nortel... there is a name I've long since forgotten. Mostly saw them when I was interfacing a T1 to a PBX as part of a migration to the early days of Cisco VOIP (very early 2000s).

[@observium4013]

👀

[@BurkenProductions]

you call 10 kg light?! wtf

[@funkiam9214]

zabbix for monitoring rox!