[ih] Interop historical material?

[Stephen Casner]

Jack,

Sorry, the internet-history mailer prunes images.

                                                        -- Steve

On Thu, 2 Dec 2021, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:

> Very nice, Karl!   Good stories.  Interop was a crucial part of Internet
> History.   Building an Internet involves a lot more than writing RFCs.
>
> I found the description of the Interop "spy net" interesting.  I never knew
> how you guys managed to corral that beast of wires and boxes scattered across
> a convention hall.
>
> That reminded me of a discussion that occurred back in the late 70s timeframe,
> when TCP V2 was undergoing open heart surgery to recast it as TCP/IP V4.   The
> debate centered on whether or not there should be "out of band control" for
> the various pieces of the Internet, so that debugging problems could be done
> remotely even when the basic Internet service itself wasn't working for
> whatever reason.
>
> We never got very far on describing the "spy net", and eventually concluded it
> would just make the Internet mechanisms too complex and slow things down.   So
> things like SNMP and ICMP were defined on top of the IP service instead of
> some separate "spy net" (call it a control plane if you like...), and we hoped
> it would be OK.
>
> Of course today's boxes, at least the consumer-level ones that I have as an
> end-user, don't have RS232 console ports any more, so the Interop technique
> wouldn't work now.   It just dawned on me that I *did* put in a rudimentary
> independent "control plane" in the equipment running now in my house.   My
> internet boxes are plugged into "smart home" outlets, that can be
> independently controlled through radio channels separate from Wifi (I use
> Zwave mostly).
>
> That doesn't have as much functionality as an RS232 console, but it does
> provides the basics.  When something's wrong, a simple tap on my phone turns
> off the Internet boxes and turns them back on.
>
> First rule of network troubleshooting -- try rebooting!
>
> Jack Haverty
>
> PS - speaking of ACE, see attached image; that's been on my desk as landing
> pad for my coffee mug for close to 40 years.
>
>
> On 12/1/21 12:58 PM, Karl Auerbach wrote:
> > On 11/22/21 6:26 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> > > Speaking of Interop....
> > >
> > > Has any of the material from the Interops been preserved? There were
> > > administrative pieces, like lists of vendors, floor maps, titles of
> > > sessions, speakers' presentations, attendee lists, and such as well as
> > > mountains of presentation slides, papers, vendor handouts, and promotional
> > > material.
> >
> > I was a leader of the team that designed and deployed the Interop nets from
> > the outset in the late 1980's.  Many of the early show nets were designed at
> > my house.  My now wife worked at Dan Lynch's company ACE ("Another Cute
> > Employee") trying to manage the herd of cats that was the shownet team.
> >
> > A lot of material from Interop exists.  There is an active body of folks who
> > designed, deployed, and operated the show net over the years.
> >
> > My own website has some ancient materials
> > (https://cavebear.com/archive/interop/) including the handout from the tours
> > we gave of the net infrastructure.  (BTW, the very first of those tours was
> > the one I gave to you and Vint at one of our DC shows.)
> >
> > There was also the Linda Feferman film from an early show -
> > https://youtu.be/SMkKIaHee4c   I'd sure like to get a better print of that,
> > or better the original, uncut footage.
> >
> > Those of us who worked on the Interop net have masses of materials cached
> > away, much of it online.
> >
> > But some was definitely not preserved - we never talked about our movie
> > nights when we'd take over some comfortable vendor booth at night when the
> > show was closed and watch movies and pass around a lot of single malt - most
> > of which we bought using Dan Lynch's credit card.
> >
> > And more than one of us met our then-to-be spouses while working on the show
> > net.
> >
> > The show had a rule - connect and try to interoperate.  We were not nice to
> > vendors who tried to be islands.  And when we did find a vendor that was
> > doing bad things (whether by intent or accident) we were not slow to cut
> > them off.
> >
> > We had to make things work - this was practical networking at its finest and
> > most stressful.  We had to cover every detail from connectors and splicing
> > to multi-homed BGP to IP multicast to ATM VPI/VCI routing to dragging wire
> > through parking lots and coring buildings.
> >
> > There were several dimensions to the show net.  The most obvious was the
> > topology.  We had 45/8 as our address space that we dragged around from
> > place to place.  Not long after we started we multi-homed that address
> > block, which often severely stressed the route damping of our external
> > connectivity providers as we bounced up and down in the days when we brought
> > up that block in a new location.
> >
> > What was not seen was the evolution from a star configuration to a rather
> > massive rib-and-spine physical topology.  We had to get the basic
> > infrastructure into a convention center fairly quickly before the trucks
> > came onto the floor.  We had to invent a system of pull-down drops with
> > bungie cords to stay out of the way of the trucks.  And within minutes after
> > closing we had to release those drops back to the ceiling to get out of the
> > way of the trucks removing the vendors stuff.  And there was a lot of other
> > network cable infrastructure that went out to areas other than the show
> > floor.  For example, we often had laser scopes on building rooftops to
> > provide links to other locations.
> >
> > We had everything.  In the early shows we had TCP/IP, ISO/OSI, DECnet, and
> > Netware.  We had lots and lots of routers - we had pairs of Cisco's and
> > Wellfleets and I think some Proteon and 3COM routers.  We had lots of media
> > types.  The early shows used yellow hose ethernet but we jumped onto
> > Synoptics and David Systems twisted pair ethernet the moment we first saw
> > it.  We also had FDDI (and we found bugs in the specifications) and ATM and
> > just about everything else, including ethernet-over-barbed wire.  We were
> > also fairly intent on making IP multicast work (and it did.)
> >
> > Rarely seen were the warehouses where we built the intrastructure before the
> > show and did a lot of testing (including full power-off/restore testing.)
> > We would build the net and pack it onto large trucks for shipping to the
> > convention centers.  I remember us loading 46 large trucks on one occasion.
> > Dave Bridgham (FTP Software) and I were considering buying a used C130 as a
> > way to move some of our gear, especially when we had a fast shift, such as
> > from Las Vegas to Paris or Tokyo in a week or two.
> >
> > The convention centers were large - it was physically impossible to get
> > around when things went awry.  So we deployed an entirely separate physical
> > network that we called the "spy network".  We used this for several things.
> > One was to get to terminal servers that attached to the RS232 serial ports
> > of all our our infrastructure devices.  That way we could get control from
> > our NOC.  We also had systems of mirrors mounted on piezo-electric crystal
> > steering devices so that we could switch the fiber optic links of the spy
> > network so that we could drop a packet sniffer anywhere we wanted.  (We had
> > passive splitters on many of the fiber links.)
> >
> > We also used a lot of rather heavy grade fiber cables - we ended up
> > depleting the US military's stockpile of certain many-strand, quick-connect
> > fiber connectors.
> >
> > I developed the first Internet "butt set" as a tool to get out on the floor
> > and begin diagnosing problems within seconds after arrival.  (Parts of that
> > still exist in some of the tools now sold by companies such as Fluke and one
> > of my fellow designers of that went on to form other diagnostic tool
> > companies, such as Air Magnet.)
> >
> > We had a lot of fun doing the show net.  For instance we had very early VoIP
> > - I remember being on a call with NTIA about the yet-to-be formed ICANN and
> > mentioned that I was calling over the net (from the show floor) and hearing
> > some very surprised sounds from people who did not know that such a thing
> > was even possible.
> >
> > And on another occasion I used some early RTP/RTCP based audio-video
> > software from Precept Software - I had a camera+microphone duct-taped onto a
> > hardhat and carried a laptop with a stack of batteries duct-taped on.  I
> > sort of looked like a terrorist-in-training.  I interviewed people on the
> > show floor. My wife called it the "husband cam" because she could see
> > everyone I looked at - and I looked a lot: in those days the vendor booths
> > often had what we referred to as "booth bunnies".
> >
> > The show was a target for attack.  The very first attack was rather mild -
> > Carl Malamud and I were setting up some NCD Xterms and suddenly a foreign
> > desktop appeared on all of them.  Someone was trying to steal
> > username/password pairs via faux login screens.
> >
> > The net at the shows was just a thin layer over the work to get that net
> > deployed.  We had to deal with immature technologies, new implementations,
> > and constraints that were often far from technical.  For instance, we had
> > senior union electricians who figured they could bend, cut, and splice our
> > coax cables - or worse, our fiber optic cables. We learned how to deal with
> > the unions - from peeling off bills from thick wads of twenties, to pointing
> > out that fiber optic cables are pipes for light and perhaps could be better
> > handled by people from the plumbers' unions, to simply bringing along our
> > own, and trusted, union electricians.)  We weren't always within the law -
> > like when we pulled fiber optics through the active railroad tunnels at the
> > Atlanta convention center.
> >
> > We were a smelly bunch - convention centers are not air conditioned while
> > the trucks are going in/out.  And in Las Vegas that meant working in 100F+
> > heat.  And we would work 24 hours a day for days on end.  We had to mandate
> > sleep and shower periods.   (But even then we were a smelly bunch - for
> > instance when we got snowed in in DC and trucks started dumping manure for a
> > garden show days before we were able to get out networking gear out.)
> >
> > In addition to the tech a lot of other stuff happened.  For instance I first
> > met a friend by climbing through her car window as we went to blow off steam
> > doing some white water rafting in western Pennsylvania.   About 30 of us
> > (all wearing Motorola radios that kept squawking) got mugged directly in
> > front of the White House.  (Although the muggers had guns I think our group
> > was better armed - one does not realize how useful to networking a good
> > knife can be.)  We had parties, such as when we rented the Air and Space
> > museum in DC, the roof of the the La Defense arch in Paris, and the Howard
> > Hughes Suite (two floors) at the now gone Desert Inn in Las Vegas.
> >
> >         --karl--
> >
>
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