bwann

7 ms·

1.
by bwann 11mo ago
I've been running it the last year or two to get e-mail to a vintage DOS BBS that had a UUCP package. I was pleasantly surprised it was out of the box usable on both CentOS and Debian, and Postfix still ships with example UUCP email co
2.
by bwann 1y ago
Vintage bulletin boards and running a retro UUCP network
3.
by bwann 1y ago
The key is to use a non-compressed codec such as G.711u/a-law, and disable echo and silence suppression. I can regularly get 28.8k-33.6k carrier speeds across the US when using an ITSP/VoIP provider and my modems connected to Gran
4.
by bwann 1y ago
I used the acme-dns server ( https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns ) for this. It's basically a mini DNS server with a very basic API backed with sqlite. All of my acme.sh instances talk to it to publish TXT records, a
5.
by bwann 1y ago
and V.35 and X.21!
6.
by bwann 1y ago
Back in the ISP days of the 90s, if you used the Microsoft Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) and wanted to distribute customized versions of IE to your customers, one of the requirements was to use IE-only elements on your main we
7.
by bwann 2y ago
Qmodem was my favorite comm program during the BBS days, and it still is today when working with vintage computers. It was just nice to use. Its scripting language was the first I used and I find myself wishing there was a Linux comm progra
8.
by bwann 3y ago
These were pretty decent, not too terrible, and could be set up to dial normal ISPs. They filled a niche with older customers and/those who had zero computer experience but wanted to check email and browse web pages back in the 90s. Th
9.
by bwann 3y ago
truss, that's a command I haven't seen in a long time
10.
by bwann 3y ago
I'm surprised there's no mention of QBasic that shipped with MS-DOS >= 5.0. This was built on top of EDIT.COM, and while it only ran a BASIC interpreter instead of compiling an executable like full-blown QuickBasic. IIRC it had
11.
by bwann 3y ago
Traffic to vs through a router; both UDP and ICMP probes to a given hop will both go to the control plane which can be rate limited or handled by a general purpose CPU. Probes to hops beyond will virtually always go through the fast data pl
12.
by bwann 3y ago
Trivia: 32,768 + 666 is the usual starting port of most implementations
13.
by bwann 3y ago
+1 for this, I always recommend ras' tutorials at NANOG. He goes into a lot of detail people just hand wave over or don't even consider
14.
by bwann 3y ago
Usually this meant the new neighborhood was put behind a subscriber loop carrier (SLC) which added an extra analog/digital conversion. Voice calls were getting digitized locally, sent across a T1 (only 4 wires needed, instead of 96-192
15.
by bwann 3y ago
To nitpick, the 53.3k limit only affected US Robotics' pre-V.90 standard called X2, due to how much power they would require, which violated FCC rules. K56Flex (the competing 56k protocol), and later the ratified V.90 standard didn&#x2
16.
by bwann 3y ago
There's still a decent community of people running them either for nostalgia and/or bringing them into the Internet area. Some are telnet/ssh only, some have actual dial-up modems too. I set up Wildcat! 4 (a DOS based BBS sof
17.
by bwann 3y ago
In my younger times I used to go to a lot of livestock auctions with the family. There was always a goat just casually standing by next to the egress gate of the arena to lead these panicked animals out, walk back in, and they would always
18.
by bwann 3y ago
I recently tried this for making a YT video using an ATA with a USR Courier dialing into a ISP's POP in San Jose. V.92 flat out didn't work for me, but V.90 did. Surprisingly I was able get 50-53k downstream carrier rates, upstrea
19.
by bwann 3y ago
Most people tended to use their own ISP's mail servers back then. Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL were the only third-party email services around, before the likes of Gmail took off. It would be trivial to go look at mail server logs to see if
20.
by bwann 3y ago
As an small ISP owner in the 90s, there was no way to win. Incoming phone lines were a considerable hunk of your expenses so you wanted to have enough available at peak time in the evenings to not have busy signals. Smaller POPs may have on
21.
by bwann 4y ago
Using a hostname will be an improvement, but not perfect. It's going to depend on the firewall implementation whether it resolves the hostname to IP address one time and remembers it forever, or periodically refreshes the mapping. I&#x
22.
by bwann 7y ago
many of my teenage years were spent downloading the "A" set of floppies over 28.8k modem, until I befriended somebody at a university who downloaded the whole thing to a QIC tape and just mailed it to me
23.
by bwann 7y ago
Yes, but sometimes you can break your configuration management in such a way that it can't recover and need a rapid way to fix things or see the state of the world. It's very handy to have a tool ready to go that can assist. Sure,
24.
by bwann 7y ago
I shot the F9 SSO-A launch with my FLIR One back in December. Visually it was about the same as yours, but what was surprising how well the iPhone picked up the low frequency rumbles. Playing it back on a stereo with a subwoofer was enterta
25.
by bwann 8y ago
Your friends already know what your phone number is
26.
by bwann 8y ago
I totally get people want a "only me" option here, but really how bad is "friends-only" here? If I'm "friends" with you, you probably already know my phone number in real life.
27.
by bwann 8y ago
This is easily solved with mDNS/Avahi. I had the same gripe years ago, now my hosts advertise their own records or even on behalf of others without running a NS.
28.
by bwann 8y ago
The worst were pages that compiled large numbers of random modem init strings for different modems. They just got copied around from page to page with no context as to what they did, nor why. They often wound up being worse than factory de
29.
by bwann 8y ago
While I think this touches on a big part of it, I think the bigger thing is the need for identifying stations for accountability. If there was a protocol that emitted an encrypted blob followed by cleartext/phone callsign, it would pro
30.
by bwann 8y ago
Helium is also used in liquid fueled rockets to pressurize tanks and some pneumatics. I can't image how much we sent to space in the Apollo era alone.

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