akamai yesterday - what in the world was that

Fri Jan 24 15:09:34 UTC 2020

On Fri, Jan 24, 2020 at 9:55 AM Aaron Gould <aaron1 at gvtc.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks Jared, When I reminisce with my boss he reminds me that this telco/ISP here initially started with a 56kbps internet uplink , lol

Oh, gods, what have you done?! This comment will bring everyone out of
the woodwork, reminiscing about the good ol' days....

So, I grew up in South Africa, and one of the more fascinating /
cooler things I saw was a modem which would get you ~50bps (bps, not
Kbps) over a single strand of barbed wire -- you'd hammer a largish
nail into the ground, and clip one alligator[0] clip onto that, and
another alligator clip onto the barbed wire. Repeat the process on the
other side (up to ~5km away), plug the modems in, and bits would
flow... I only saw these used a few times, but always thought they
were cool....

One of the first ISPs I worked at had an AGS+ as the "core" router
(and a pile of IGS's) -- the AGS had metal plate in the front to
access the "line cards", and a monster big squirrel fan - the squirrel
fan was strong enough that the vacuum / airflow would keep the metal
plate sucked on if you didn't do up the screw.. anyway, the device
also had a watchdog timer, which would reboot the box if IOS[1] locked
up, and the fan would slow down while this occurred -- so, for a long
time, our fastest / most reliable monitoring was an empty PC case
placed on the floor under the rack -- when the router locked up, the
fan would slow down, the front would fall off[2] and bounce on the PC
case, making an unholy racket - and alerting the NOC that something
bad was happening....

Anyway, so I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the
time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels
had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Give me five bees for a quarter,
you'd say.
Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was I had an onion on
my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white
onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big
yellow ones...

W
[0]: In .za we called them crocodile clips -- true story.
[1]: For all you young whippersnappers, that's the Cisco IOS, not the
Apple iOS.. :-/
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM -- Unlike the rest of
this email, this is off-topic, but still great....

>
> -Aaron
>
>

-- 
I don't think the execution is relevant when it was obviously a bad
idea in the first place.
This is like putting rabid weasels in your pants, and later expressing
regret at having chosen those particular rabid weasels and that pair
of pants.
   ---maf