netblazer Was: baiting

Tue Jan 18 16:13:23 UTC 2005

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Robert E.Seastrom [mailto:rs at seastrom.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2005 11:11 AM
> To: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine
> Cc: Hannigan, Martin; wsimpson at greendragon.com; nanog at merit.edu
> Subject: Re: netblazer Was: baiting
> 
> 
> 
> Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner at nic-naa.net> writes:
> 
> > In this period of time, the White Knights built the InterOp 
> shownets and
> > we had comparative access to quite a lot of vendor product, 
> and know that
> > the red buttons on Wellfleets were correctly positioned on 
> the front, for
> > easy access. We used NetBlazers for dial-up outbound (we 
> were topologically
> > quite diverse by '91, our last show in the San Jose 
> facility) and I don't
> > recall anything ... resembling the behavior that I could 
> characterize as
> > POS like function.
> 
> My recollection of that show was "T-1 to BARRnet", not
> bonded-Netblazer-dialout, but I didn't "work the show" until the
> following spring, so my recollection could be at fault.
> 
> I wouldn't characterize Netblazers as being particularly cruddy
> compared to other options available at the time.  Remember that this
> was the era of the Cisco ASM, the Encore/Xylogics Annex (Wellfleet
> hadn't changed their name to Bay yet, much less bought the Annex
> product line), some nasty 3com terminal server of which my memory has
> thankfully purged most details and the gone but not lamented Cisco
> TRouter.  The Netblazers worked pretty darned well when plugged into
> Telebit modems.  Third party modems, well, there were a lot of knobs
> you could twist, and not the best in the way of documentation on what
> to do with 'em.
> 
> Based on my experience with them, I'm quite sure they were fabulous
> devices capable of being configured in the field to do just about
> anything, if you had the level of familiarity with their internals
> that someone who worked QA for them would have had.

There really wasn't any good modem, IMHO, back then. They were all 
painful to configure and make work reliably. Once the "net" revolution
started it still took years to get modems working reliably.

In '98 I know that the Max TNT was only getting about 85% call completion
across_the_board. Call completion only takes into account the completed
handshake. Then you dealt with code issues after you got them to at least
connect.

-M< 