[ih] Karl's post from Friday: Re: Interop as part of Internet History (was Re: Fwd: Fwd: List archives (Was: Exterior Gateway Protocol))

[Vint Cerf]

sounds to me like a history of Interop would be a big contribution to the
record.

v


On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 12:22 AM Joseph Touch via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Subject: Re: [ih] Interop as part of Internet History (was Re: Fwd: Fwd:
> List archives (Was: Exterior Gateway Protocol))
> Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2020 14:56:57 -0700
> From: Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com> <mailto:karl at cavebear.com>
> To: Dan Lynch <dan at lynch.com> <mailto:dan at lynch.com>, Jack Haverty <
> jack at 3kitty.org> <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>
> CC: internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
>
> On 9/10/20 9:26 PM, Dan Lynch via Internet-history wrote:
> > “I know it works. I saw it at Interop.”
> >
> > That became our tag line in our early marketing of Interop.
>
> Interop had two major parts, maybe three.
>
> - There was the "show net".
>
> - There were the vendors (who had to attach to the show net)
>
> - There were presentations/papers.
>
> The show was one of the critical drivers that forced vendors to have
> working products.
>
> Interop was a loud bell that rang once or twice a year. And lord help the
> vendor whose products were not ready when that bell tolled.
>
> (Another major driver of vendors was the now largely forgotten Air Force
> ULANA procurement.)
>
> There were a lot of companies who thought they were interoperable but
> discovered otherwise at the show. We were not shy about turning off vendors
> that were so non-interoperable that they were causing problems.
>
> The importance of Interop in forcing early Internet products to work
> together can not be overstated.
>
> For fifteen or so years I was part of the core volunteer "NOC Team" that
> designed, installed, and operated that net.
>
> It was not a small net - tens of thousands of hosts, lots of internal
> routing issues (we had massive redundancy), multiple external providers
> (hence a lot of BGP juggling), big DNS, heavy traffic loads, external
> attacks, etc
>
> Many of the early Interop show networks were designed at my house in Santa
> Cruz.
>
> (I also met my wife via the show net; she was working at Dan's ACE
> [Another Cute Employee] and charge of the volunteer core team.)
>
> Here's a video or us installing the '93 net (either San Francisco or DC)
> that Dan Lynch had made (by Linda Fefferman). (I spoke to her a few years
> back and she still had the raw betamax tapes from which this video was
> made.)
>
> https://youtu.be/SMkKIaHee4c <https://youtu.be/SMkKIaHee4c>
>
> Here's a few, very few, early photos:
>
> https://www.cavebear.com/archive/interop/ <
> https://www.cavebear.com/archive/interop/>
>
> We had a class A /8 (45.x.x.x) to play around with. We subnetted it
> heavily.
>
> In the early days we also carried DECnet, Netware/IPX, as well as IPv4
> (including IP multicast). We also did IPv6 fairly early.
>
> We (John Romkey, Simon Hackett, and I) showed the first two Internet
> Toasters (yes there were two) at the 1989 show in San Jose. Unfortunately
> on the first day we forgot to bring bread - so we had to toast and re-toast
> the same slice.
>
> In 1997 during one of the shows I called from the show floor over an early
> IP based phone into an NTIA conference call - for most of the participants
> that was the first IP based phone call they had ever heard.
>
> And during that same show I used a wi-fi and IP multicast battery powered
> camera (mounted on a hard hat) to broadcast interviews on the show floor -
> I kinda looked like a mad bomber, my wife called it the "husband cam"
> because she could see who I was looking at as I wandered the show floor.)
>
> We quickly developed a rib-and-spine approach for convention centers. In
> the San Jose and DC shows we used lots and lots of routers - Cisco,
> Wellfleet, and 3COM.
>
> Management of that was a pain, so we quickly developed two management
> networks - a so called "spy" net which used remote controlled optical
> mirrors so that we could create direct bi-directional ethernet paths onto
> any part of the show network. We used that for monitoring and getting to
> disconnected parts. We also had a separate management net that led us to
> the console ports of all the routers (and switches.)
>
> One of our important developments was the ability to pre-wire a convention
> center in a warehouse - by the time we were doing the Atlanta shows it took
> 45 fully loaded trucks to haul our gear from our warehouse to the
> convention center. Dave Bridgham and I considered bying a C 130 to get some
> of the gear around quickly. And we really stressed out the local Frys.
>
> We developed a rubber-bungee strap system so that we could dangle the
> booth drops from the convention center ceiling, but above the roofs of the
> trucks that drive around the show floor during setup. After the show the
> bungees would pull the drops back up out of the way of the trucks. We also
> learned how to co-exist on friendly terms with the local unions - many of
> workers were not then familiar with network tech and were more than willing
> to work with us to learn.)
>
> We also developed a portable fiber plant using a massive "pink" cable with
> some serious (and expensive) quick-connect plug/socket devices - we bought
> out the entire national supply of those (and discovered that we had
> depleted the US national military stockpile of 'em.)
>
> We also got really good at moving a /8 around the world - sometimes in a
> matter of days. During hook-up we would stress-out most providers BGP
> implementations due to the up/down cycles during hook-up. That's when many
> providers learned about route flapping and damping.
>
> Our core team evolved over the years - at the start it was small, with
> people like Simon Hackett (
> https://www.cavebear.com/archive/interop/Internode <
> https://www.cavebear.com/archive/interop/Internode>); John Romkey, Dave
> Bridgham, Stev Knowles, Peter deVris (FTP software); Geoff Baehr (Sun);
> Stuart Vance (TGV); me (Epilogue Technology, Empirical Tools and Toys); etc.
>
> The first year or two was mostly yellow-hose ethernet.
>
> Then David Systems and Synoptics turned us onto 10-Base-T. Which we
> mis-wired with stranded-wire connectors and had to re-connect the entire
> show floor (by hand) overnight.
>
> Eventually we got good with fiber, managed by David Steele (who did some
> of the fiber plans for the 777 aircraft) and Merike Kaeo (Merike also
> handled our early FDDI deployment - during which we found flaws in the
> specifications and vendors were deploying fixes during the show.) And we
> got really good at both local routing and multi-homed external routing. Our
> three router goddesses were Cindi Jung (3COM), Robin Littlefield
> (Wellfleet), and Chris Pecina (Cisco?)
>
> We weren't beyond pulling a few legs. A surprising number of people (and
> tech journalists) believed this press release we issued:
>
> https://www.cavebear.com/archive/cavebear/catalogue/maypressrelease.html <
> https://www.cavebear.com/archive/cavebear/catalogue/maypressrelease.html>
>
> One year when we had something like 90 routers on the show floor we bought
> a bunch of spacey-looking TV dish antennae, put one on each router, and
> aimed them at a disco ball on the convention center ceiling - and told
> people that it was a low-earth orbit geosynchronous satellite.
>
> I gave the first "tour" of our show net at the first DC show to Jack
> Haverty and Vint Cerf. That tour evolved into a regular part of the show.
> (That may have been the year when we got snowed into the convention center.)
>
> Over the years our group grew - there are a few hundred members by now -
> and we got really good a "commando networking". We could wire up a big
> convention center (like Atlanta) plus hotels (in Atlanta we ran illicit
> cables through active train tunnels.) We got good at running laser aimed
> links between hotel room windows and remote rooftops.
>
> Much of what we learned made its way out to the ISP world. I developed
> test and diagnostic tools that found their way into products by Fluke and
> others.
>
> Other ideas vanished - like my demo of inserting words into VoIP calls or
> our demo of a RAID 5 array made of USB flash drives via iSCSI over wi-fi.
>
> --karl--
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>


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