Is our ISP ready for a beta test? - ISP Series Episode 5

[@Faselbob]

I love how the wizard on a professional network device is displaying "first day learning about networking" level of explanation.

[@BDBD16]

Well back then a lot of small ISPs were people who didn't have much more than base PC knowledge.

[@jfbeam]

That was exactly what the "wiz" was for. If you knew the platform, you'd use the CLI (or directly edit files.)

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@jfbeamexactly - if _you_ were a wizard you didn’t need the software wizard ;)

[@AntonyTCurtis]

I helped set up an ISP in the early 1990s. We actually used OS/2 2.0 with multiport serial cards to manage the modems and it would transparently proxy and cache web access - quickly buffering what the user requested and then feeding the modems as fast as they could handle. Customers really liked how fast our service felt compared to other ISPs at the time. When things went to 56kbaud, we ended up selling the customers to a major ISP as we couldn't afford the jump. Fun times.

[@retrozmachine1189]

Reminds me of a setup I came across in the '90s. It was a fairly sprawling site that only had a smattering of independent ethernet networks present. No cross site network. To work around this a significant number of the computers had dialup modems to dial into a central modem pool to get email and periodic internet access, which itself was provided by 4 dialups set up in a multi-link pool as it was a remote-ish site. The analogue extensions were provided by a Fujitsu 9600 PABX. At the server end was a Windows NT4 PC, 25MHz 486 sounds about right, with a plain dumb multiport serial card, probably using 16450s but can't remember. Hanging off that card was something like 30 V.34 modems. The connect rates were excellent as expected but throughput was poor with frequent dropped bytes on the serial ports when all the modems were connected, which was most of the time. Very little idle time with the number of PCs attempting to periodically dial-in to collect email. The company I worked for was asked to work out what the problem was. It took all of 3 seconds on site to see the problem. The IRQ load from the dumb serial card was so high that it more or less bought the PC to its knees. Just basic GUI operation was snail paced. We made a few recommendations but in the end they settled on the minimum effort one which was to change out the dumb serial card with an Equinox SSI. It immediately bought the system to normalcy, if you can ever call a setup like this place had normal. IRQ load went to essentially nothing. GUI became responsive. 0 dropped bytes. We went on to implement an extensive fibre network across the whole site and get everything sane, including comms between the power distribution building that was something like 2 x 4MVA transformers and the electrical maintenance offices, but that's another story.

[@orangejjay]

This is legit one of the coolest things the KZbin algorithm has ever recommended. I watch so many things with "retro" computing and it's all been put put years ago which means it's easy to binge watch all the parts of a series. Having to wait is a different experience! Love this series and having to wait is hard! 😂😂❤ Can't wait to see what's ahead.

[@dustlosty]

so cool to see brazil mentioned on serial port!

[@FLECOM]

I helped remove some PortMaster 3 terminal servers a while back, I kept them with the intent of doing a retro ISP some day, these videos are very inspiring! might have to dust them off soon! Thanks for the excellent videos!

[@doctorwade927]

Portmaster was what we used in the early days. We went from those to Lucent Max TNTs. We recycled the Portmasters to our datacenters with a modem and serial connections going to our servers and Cisco routers in case we needed a back door from getting the dreaded lockout when making routing changes. I wish we had one to use today!

[@cbrunnkvist]

The fact that I was staring excitedly with joy at the screen waiting for that "CONNECT 28800" to come in behind the veil of the Dialup UI is, I suspect, possibly saying that I am the the correct audience for this series/video

[@BGraves]

I hooked my 486 PC up by extension cord at the utility pole and found I could get 53k

[@codebeatr]

Oh wow, I've been following this series since the very beginning and not only the intro sequence shows my hometown, but also my very building! A literal 1/55000 shot. Ha!

[@TradieTrev]

Loving this series! You've done so well to put this together!

[@BurkenProductions]

Yeah but it's too much history and to little hardware play so you have to scroll past all th ose info parts no one wanna see anyway.

[@drcyb3r]

At work we use something similar. A RS232 server controlled via LAN. You can control stuff via a web console or use a protocol to connect to the RS232 ports remotely and use them as if they were connected to your PC. We use them to communicate with old systems that we can't abondon but still need to communicate with.

[@foxyfoxington2651]

Oooh, I've been waiting for you to get to the Portmaster! My dad worked for Livingston back in the day (latter half of high school for me). He was a technical writer and he worked on a lot of the documentation for the later Portmaster products (I believe the example you have was before his time; but he did have a Portmaster 3 in his office at home). He was around for the Lucent acquisition, ended up working for Ascend, and eventually ended up leaving Alcatel-Lucent to do freelance work about a decade ago (he has since retired). Unfortunately all those stock options weren't worth very much after the bubble burst. But he had a good couple of years of fun start-up culture before the acquisition.

[@gamingthunder6305]

i use to support them between 2008 and 2012. i remember hardly anything about them anymore but we never used the GUI and did everything from console. also they where at least during that time not used for ISPs anymore and more so to have serial console access of other devices in the server room. like accessing a cisco console remotely in case the router was not accessible any other way. nice seeing something i supported a long time ago in a video.

[@BertPdeboy]

Amazing video! Looking forward to that deeper dive into RADIUS.

[@bradkistner2591]

I was all of 21 and had a 2nd hand Portmaster 2e dumped on my desk and was told to set it up for RAS for my company. It really was easy because even though it was my first experience with terminal server and RADIUS, I had it working in a couple of hours. Not an ISP, but it was an ISP technically as you got on the internet. RADIUS came from an NT4 domain controller. Initially had 5 USR 33.6 modems on and it was super simple to expand just adding modems. These videos bring me right back. Love it, keep it up!

[@Fratm]

Brings back so many memories, I built and ran an ISP in the 90s, and we used the PM2e, it was great hardware at the time. Thanks for this series.

[@malicious217]

I grew up on dialup and now work for a major ISP. I missed a lot of this and it's awesome to see. Thanks!

[@TomStorey96]

All if this dialup talk made me dust off some of my Cisco gear and create a "PSTN simulator and dialup ISP in a box". It's a Cisco 3825 with some VWICs to provide PSTN ports for modems or phones, an E1 trunk to handle calls for the ISP side, and a NM-DM with 6 modems on it. I'll try getting dialup working from my IBM XT for some really extreme retro living. 😅

[@treyscarborough1901]

Love this series! Brings back my fond memories of working on Livingston postmaster. I had stacks of pm2 and pm3s at one point. Back in the late 90s I ran a dialup isp with over 20k subscribers. This was very close to the experience I remember when I was first learning these.

[@r000tbeer]

I'm loving this trip down memory lane, but no way I would trade my gig fiber!

[@naterivard]

This series is amazing thank you for taking us along for the ride. Wild to see all the specialized network gear that put us online in the 90s. This stuff powered AIM, ICQ and hella slow napster downloads but it did in style.

[@prozacgodretro]

I'm pretty sure the ISP I was working for ages ago used the Portmaster box, I think it's awesome you're going with one... I would totally love to build an ISP like this :D scratch the nostalgia itch... You should also get a whole bunch of Windows95 boxes dialing up to it, where they accidentally shared off their entire C drive to the internet for that "authentic touch"

[@kbhasi]

Sharing the system drive… 😳 I can only imagine how fun or catastrophic that could've been…

[@prozacgodretro]

@@kbhasiit was wild, also windows 95 and 98 had a bug where if there was an explorer.exe in the root of the c drive, it would run that instead of the c:\windows\explorer.exe ... *ehem* ... a um... friend told me.

[@SwitchingPower]

The CPLD has PCI support and the UARTs have a ISA like interface so the CPLD is probably used as the bridge between the PCI bus from the CPU to all the UARTs and LEDs

[@donwald3436]

ISPs in this era were a curious beast, you had a few T1s coming in for Internet and a bunch of T1s coming in for dial-up users, all you did was route across lol. Well that and providing email and web hosting I guess.

[@onuroskay8613]

What a patience you have. Congratulations

[@MattWhitehorn]

Cool to see the Portmaster in action - there's one in the office I work in, that has spent all it's time as a monitor stand - with me never knowing anything about the functionality.

[@Sharkie1717]

Thank you for all the hard work and detail, in these wonderful videos

[@hotrodhunk7389]

I've been looking forward to this!

[@AiOinc1]

I can't wait to get into this network

[@jfbeam]

The things that require a reboot _aren't_ things you'd ever be changing in production. In my experience, once your PM is setup and taking calls, it almost never gets touched. (the modems are the things that screw up / break, the PM just keeps on doing it's thing.) We used netblazers, so from time to time the 3.5" floppy disk has to be replaced. ("refreshed") And there, the most common reason to ever touch one was to clear a cached user -- so their changed password would be picked up. As for the "new hardware" of the TS2000... it isn't. It's built exactly like everything that came before it... a stack of 16k's directly visible to the CPU/OS. The CPLD manages the LEDs, and maybe power sequencing (but I doubt it's that complicated.) The netblazer is the only thing I remember using intelligent serial ports. (and those specialX (?) cards did have linux support, eventually.) Digi also eventually had linux support. Odd that a company making intelligent serial cards didn't put that tech in their own terminal servers.

[@mndodd]

When using Radius, once the PM was set up I don't recall messing with it unless we had to apply an upgrade. I'm looking forward to seeing how T.S.P. deals with the most common problem we had; account sharing/simultaneous logins.

[@jfbeam]

@@mndodd We did it with RADIUS accounting. It's not perfect, but it _mostly_ works. _Mostly_ (from time to time, someone from the helpdesk would ask me to clear a login count.) The real trick was making it work with multi-link PPP (bonded ISDN)

[@Myfatheredward]

Excellent! Thank you for this series.

[@rujipars]

I started my career with an ISP with Xyplex, Lucent MAX, Port master, Cisco AS5300 when ADSL just begin in Thailand in year 2001. The first learning assignment was given a Port master manual and figure out by myself how to setup fractional E1 with FrameRelay encap, and static route.

[@offgridtechnical6191]

I'd also like to know how you are simulating the PPP calls between terminal server and the PC...are you using an analog pbx phone system with extensions?

[@mndodd]

28 years ago we picked the Portmaster 2e and it was the right choice. Economizing on the USR Sportster might have been a better initial choice but discrete modems of any type were a constant source of service interruptions. Everyone moved to Ascend RAS PRI gear as fast as they could afford it.

[@mndodd]

Looking at old email archives it we used a USR Total Control MP/16 for our first D4 channel bank. We still had issues in that hunt group as failed modem cards potentially took out four lines.

[@jfbeam]

... or USR rack mount systems. I recall our USR salesman talking about a rural ISP in NC that used hundreds of sportster desktop modems... on window screen stacks covered by attic fans. One or two would burn out per day, but replacing a $50 modem every day was "cheaper" than buying the industrial scale TC chassis that would never fail. (I'll let you run calc.exe to confirm how dumb that was.)

[@mndodd]

When I came to Erol's in late 1996 they were just phasing out their plywood racks of USR Sporsters. It was a legit way to run an ISP on a budget. Failure modes of the Sportster were much less dramatic than the Ascend Max. I believe AOL had staff 24/7 in their POPs with a stack of paperbacks and a fire extinguisher to deal with putting out the eventual fires. @@jfbeam

[@jfbeam]

@@mndodd Only if you're bad at math. The ISP I mentioned was burning ~@20k$ per year on dead sportsters. A TC chassis would not have cost half that, and would've outlived him. Even a TNT would've been a better choice - but those need T1/PRIs. I recall the "flaming MaxTNT" stories, too. (I heard it was PSINet) The problem with those things was the left-right venting. A row of them will just keep getting hotter and hotter -- only the first rack gets cold air. The solution -- and I've actually seen PSI do this in our CO -- is a cardboard divider, basically make them front-back venting. (PSI had ~7 racks with TNTs, floor to ceiling. In my few years there, I never saw anyone EVER touch them... until PSI was no more, and they removed them.) (For the record, the TC's have the same problem... bottom-top venting. Even with a stack of 7, I never saw the top one over 30C. They'll work just fine at over 50C.)

[@mndodd]

Ultimately, if your users could accept a certain level of (lack of) service availability, failed modems in very large hunt group aren't a show stopper. Regarding side to side cooling; 45 degree racks were a work-around as were "octopus" point cooling. Eventually dialup went away and everyone's life got a lot better. @@jfbeam

[@cian87]

That Cyclades web interface looks very similar to a late 00s Avaya phone system I had to try keep going for a while. Might just be what every complex web interface looked like back then

[@Jah_Rastafari_ORIG]

I had to go back and do a double-take when I thought I saw a command named, "TacoPlus". Turned out to be "TacacsPlus" (which is almost as good).... Now I'm hungry...

[@casperghst42]

Oh, I worked a place were we used the Livingstone boxes to connect leased lines via v56 modems. Very cool, and very expensive.

[@der.Schtefan]

Oh, had I know about the TS2000 in that year! I resorted to using an array of 8X multiport PCI cards to replace an insane array of serial printers that printed SCADA logs in a factory. Running Linux, having a 100 mbit connection, and 32 MB RAM (insane amount), a small C program would have been able to parse the standardized log messages, buffer them, sort and time stamp them, and send them to a Windows machine running SQL server so you could actually search the database, back it up, analyse when which subsystem sent which kind of messages, etc. Before that, the 20+ printers were practically useless and only there in case a catastrophic failure developed, needing a hoarde of people to scan the text. I solved it with a dual Pentium Pro Windows 2000 machine and 3 of the 8x serial cards. Probably was cheaper, but felt very dodgy.

[@hgravina]

How you are simulating the telephone line ?

[@movax20h]

I like the Cyclades, pretty modern, standard software, so easy to upgrade or customize with scripts. The portmaster not too bad, the PM vision software looks horrible, and custom kernel a bit limited, but it does well what it is supposed to do. It probably has some bugs, and cannot fix them, but still decent. If I would be guessing that ribbon cable from motherboard to expansion cards is probably just ISA bus, with possibly few extra interrupt lines. The unit is also pretty damn big and not very space efficient. No sure why people love these DB25, where you can carry all modem signals over DB9 just as well, or some custom breakout cables to increase density. Other than that, it is just an x86, with lot things stripped down, no BIOS or DOS, and small kernel, with TCP/IP stack, and few daemons to manage things. It still is impressive what they did with so little memory and storage. If it was cheap, then sure, I could still see it being a hit in early 90s. $3000 for 30 port is a bit steep, definitively they would have a really huge profit margins on this, as hardware in it is rather cheap and maybe 1/4 of that price. But these were different times. Also people didn't have too many options in like 1990 or 1991. Things exploded around 1992 and 1993.

[@rmccombs66]

If you send a command to you modem at 115200, it should automatically change to 115200, if my memory is correct. The faster speed my be better for keeping to buffer full on the modem. By the way connecting 2 56K modems together over an analog connection should be able to connect at 33.6K.

[@poofygoof]

33:12 "so much more we have left to do"

[@poofygoof]

what rack-mount modems came in granularity of 10? the ones I'm aware of were in backplanes that supported 16 modems, which makes matching them to the portmaster a bit awkward.

[@AgentOffice]

Exciting

[@breadmoth6443]

so the portmaster 2e has ISDN ports on it..... so , when can we expect a video about ISDN, that type of connection always fascinated me , as it was imo the precursor to DSL , and if I am not mistaken, ISDN-DSL was actually a thing at some point.

[@PileOfEmptyTapes]

In fact, if you were in Germany, Annex B with (64K) ISDN was pretty much the standard way of getting ADSL. I'm inclined to say we retired the last such connections at work less than 2 years ago, in favor of the common VDSL with vectoring (FTTC). FTTH is being rolled out fairly widely but is by no means mainstream.

[@escgoogle3865]

I have a early 2k dell coporate chonktop with a built in rg11 modem and a REAL COPPER LAND LINE. GTG here. If I can get a solid 28.8, fun times.

[@EraYaN]

A CPLD is way too fancy and expensive to just drive some LEDs. It will be a fairly integral part of the design I assume, routing signals, handling simple logic etc. All massively parallel.

[@gemini9002]

Love this series!!!

[@colinstu]

Love this series

[@orincat10]

3:08 tux jumpscare

[@christopherrasmussen8546]

I joined your Patrion, I have a serial port (card) and a serial modem :-)

[@RandomThoughtsofDrew]

I’m surprised you haven’t had any caps leaking or need any recapping. Impressive.

[@LeeZhiWei8219]

Please make this public! I wish dial in from a very far location away... Haha (Singapore). And feel the nostalgia of dial up... That I never had. Since I'm too young.

[@EquinoxDK]

Remember using a Portmaster 2e for ISDN connectivity for Homeoffice just before the millenium.

[@stonent]

I wonder if the Livingston device made it's way into Tripp Lite products? We have tripp lite console servers at work that give us serial port access to network switches in case of a network outage and the command to access a port is called "pmshell"

[@KLNYC]

nice!! can you do some ISDN hardware too :)

[@saunderscvids]

I have an ISA Rocket Port card and two breakout boards. Would love to find an old PC to get that setup going if possible. I suspect drivers being an issue.

[@thatLion01]

Does the ISP need a phone line for each customer dialing in?

[@Gooberslot]

One thing I noticed is that the Portmaster has the highest ping times of any of them.

[@antonkapela6784]

I was going to mention the lowest RTT seems to be the TS2k, and was really wondering if the LAPM/V42 parameters were held constant amongst the various examples shown… perhaps our intrepid Serial Port Prophets would humor us by doing a “retro low ping gaming shootout” amongst the available terminal servers and back to back v.34 modems. I’d probably even pay to see it. Where’s that Patreon, again?

[@DiyintheGhetto]

I would like to setup an dialup isp. Believe it or not a lot of people still have dialup computers and laptops and can not get broadband internet.

[@Jah_Rastafari_ORIG]

@DiyintheGhetto And they can distribute their DialUp client software on free CDs bundled w/magazines no-one subscribes to anymore! ;-)

[@DiyintheGhetto]

@@Jah_Rastafari_ORIG True.

[@SomeMorganSomewhere]

Heh, I actually own two TS2000's ;)

[@minibikemadman]

local isp had tons of those portmaster. They werent cheap what the owner told me.

[@UpLateGeek]

The name portmaster sounds like the networking equivalent of the cheap, tacky gimmick products you'd see near the checkout of a sporting goods store from the 1980s. Like the puttmaster or the kickmaster or something. Which is obviously why it's my favourite. That and it's an absolutely hench unit.

[@soniclab-cnc]

looking how the traces head off from the CPLD it is likely doing some buss logic.

[@pem1200]

nice

[@87398]

cyclade network is still actif in france but is now relagated to official work like universital diploma delivery or governement work

[@BurkenProductions]

Usually you ran modem pools on cisco hardware not these kind of stuff.

[@cdoublejj]

would be cool if it could be tied in wih the telephone central office exchange museums

[@Scoopta]

Wait...cyclades became avocent who became vertiv...the company I work for uses some vertiv IP KVM equipment...that's kinda crazy

[@StarryNightSky587]

how is every third comment here "oh back then i ran my own ISP" :D

[@JK-mo2ov]

Patton devices still use a web interface just like the Cyclades…

[@IainShepherd1]

Why did the industry move towards putting serial through RJ45 jacks? What’s the win there?

[@jfbeam]

He said so in the video... simplified cabling. It also allows a higher density - 32 DB25's takes up a lot of space.

[@ethanpet113]

Si-cla-des

[@goxodsgames3363]

Just a word of warning to everyone, I picked up a Cyclades-ts800 not to long ago and i am pretty sure the storage is dying on it. those older flash chips are getting really end of life, and as far as i know they are very hard to replace.

[@xxcr4ckzzxx840]

Complete network noob here: Is there any reason why the ICMP latency is that high, even on a local connection?

[@florianflorian1385]

Compression (data is stored in a buffer before being compressed and sent, but the buffering takes time), Modem (digital -> analog -> digital conversion), Serial connection, just to name a few.

[@Garock2]

TS2000 powered by linux is so cool, unfortunately you wouldn't use it

[@2dfx]

Zyplex, Zylogix, Zyxel, Zhone, so many Z-companies!!!

[@RogerBergqvist]

MUX is my response. A UNIX hub....

[@ShainAndrews]

Enough with the music already. Seriously...

[@TheWolfReport]

You could always use db25 to rj45 adapters in the back of the portmaster.. I used to support on back in the mid 90's for teleteam internet in Dallas, tx.