[178783] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: optical gear cooling requirements
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vinny_Abello@Dell.com)
Thu Mar 5 17:57:16 2015
X-Original-To: nanog@nanog.org
From: <Vinny_Abello@Dell.com>
To: <alex@corp.nac.net>, <matthew@corp.crocker.com>, <nick@foobar.org>
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2015 22:57:12 +0000
In-Reply-To: <2ed2b557848f401294ff03d021237814@exch2013-1.hq.nac.net>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
Dell - Internal Use - Confidential=20
Still alive and well out here in 07860. :)
My memory is somewhat rusty as it's been a while, but at Tellurian I'm pret=
ty positive we ran a DS3+ worth of lines from Sprint from 07860 so I'm not =
sure if "by far" is totally accurate. ;) We terminated on a PM4 here, mostl=
y with bleeding edge fixed code that I don't think was even officially rele=
ased by Lucent. It helps if you know the developers. We had access to the s=
ource code as well at one time for the Portmaster line. I remember an emerg=
ency one time where we basically provisioned an on demand T1 to connect POP=
s together through the Portmasters via ISDN. They were cool machines. I als=
o used to run a Portmaster ORU at my house which was also rock solid. Great=
for gaming back then...
I know once we ported numbers away from Sprint to Focal/Broadwing/Level 3, =
at our peak we had two DS3's of PRI's on an AS5800 as well. Those boxes bot=
hered me as the modems frequently rotted over time and required regular mai=
ntenance to refresh them and make them happy again... otherwise your call c=
ompletion rates started dipping.
I'm surprised you had so few dialup accounts. When we shutdown all of our d=
ialup (we sent most of them to NAC), we had far more than 30 active account=
s based on all RADIUS logs. I don't know how in this day and age, but they =
were there and dialing in still up to the day I pulled the power on the AS5=
800, despite customers being warned.
Ah, memories... now I'm thinking back when I ran a BBS on Fidonet... FOSSIL=
drivers, Frontdoor, echomail. :) Now those were the days!
-Vinny
-----Original Message-----
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Alex Rubenstein
Sent: Thursday, March 5, 2015 10:10 AM
To: Matthew Crocker; Nick Hilliard
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: RE: optical gear cooling requirements
It is interesting where this conversation turned. But for history's sake...
NAC started on PM2e with Microcom's, and then USR Sportster. I remember USR=
sending us PROM chips to change from 28.8 to 33.6. After that, PM3's. We w=
ere early PM3 users, working with Megazone on an almost continuous basis to=
work on bugs. We tried the PM4, that went nowhere. Then we tried Assured A=
ccess - it had promise but ultimately was no good. Ultimately, went to used=
AS5800's with ChDS3 cards, which ran from a long time ago until just a cou=
ple months ago when we finally (and literally) pulled the plug on dialup (I=
think we had about 30 active accounts from a peak of over 35,000).=20
There was a time where NAC was by far the largest customer of the LEC porti=
on of Sprint in NJ, with two DS3's of PRI's out of NWTNJ alone (look that u=
p, it's in the woods in 07860). Sprint had to actually buy software upgrade=
s for the DMS we were out of to accommodate a hunt-group that large (or, so=
we were told). This was after we had about 700 POTS lines to a house and t=
hey begged us to move to the CO.=20
Ahh, the good old days. And it is amazing how well it all worked, in retros=
pect, and how much fun the business was. Then you see things like "Net Neut=
rality", and it makes me want to hide in the woods and shed a tear.
> >> We used Livingston Portmaster 3 back in the day. Front to back=20
> >> ventilation, ran cool as a cucumber, plug it in and it just worked.
> >> Awesome gear until Lucent bought the company to kill the product in=20
> >> favor of their Ascend TNT space heaters.
