[ih] TCP/IP routing

[Karl Auerbach]

On 5/6/26 11:00 AM, Craig Partridge via Internet-history wrote:
> I suspect there are enough wonderful stories of jury-rigging Internet
> connectivity to fill an engaging book.

When I was doing my company, Empirical Tools and Toys (officially that 
last word was "Technologies" but we kinda liked "Toys" better) we 
dangled off of TGV (Two Guys and a Vax).

This was in the 1993 time frame.

The TGV network was in a rather nice Victorian house and I was across a 
residential street in a back room of a union hall.  So we grabbed some 
thinnet Ethernet coax and draped it through the branches of several 
trees and across the street - not particularly legal (but not as crazy 
as when we ran fiber optic lines through a rather active railroad tunnel 
in Atlanta without telling the railroad company.)

We called it a "tree spanning network".

And then there was the time on the Interop net when one of our gang, who 
was running wires through a hotel, waked into a status meeting with a 
nine inch thick, twelve inch diameter concrete floor core (complete with 
re-bar in the concrete) that he rolled across the floor.  We were aghast 
- had we really punched a 12" diameter hole through a concrete floor in 
the hotel?

(The answer was 'no', but we sure were concerned until we got that answer.)

Also for the Interop show nets - we often had to run links to hotels in 
the city - at various times we used microwave and others we used lasers 
(routed through amateur astronomer telescopes).  We discovered that when 
we roof mounted these that the wind caused us to loose our aim.  So we 
rented hotel rooms on upper floors and aimed the gear out the windows.  
But then we encountered 'housekeeping" - they would knock our stuff out 
of alignment.

So how does one keep "housekeeping" out?  Those little "do not disturb" 
signs don't work.  But telling the front desk to inform staff that the 
room had "unruly" or "contagiously ill" occupants did the trick.

For the Interop nets we did lots of ad hoc stuff - I remember dragging 
cables over the vent hoods in a hotel kitchen.  And we had issues with 
house/union electricians who thought they understood network wires - 
they didn't: they would fold coax or cut coax and try to splice it with 
a soldering iron.  We found two solutions.  First is that we induced a 
local union electrician who understood this stuff to join our crew - 
that helped smooth our relations with the unions.  Second is that we 
said "You know, our fiber optics are not carrying electricity, rather 
they are pipes for light.  And you are an 'electrical' union.  Should we 
hand the work to the union plumbers?"  (Although for the shows in NYC, 
the best cure was to carry a big wad of $20 and $50 bills and peel them 
off as needed to buy cooperation.)

We used a lot of fiber optic cabling - we adopted a 26-strand Kevlar 
armored cable with (quite expensive) quick connect connectors at either 
end.  Turns out that we used so many of those connectors that we 
depleted the US national military stockpile of them.

One of our crew moved on to repurpose the fiber optics in old undersea 
cables to be network links to miles-deep oceanic research sensors.

The Interop show nets, despite our months of planning and pre-building 
in a warehouse, were a land of ad hoc solutions.  We drained the local 
Fry's Electronics stores to get this or that. And Dave Bridgham and I 
started to seriously consider buying a C130 to carry our spares.  (I 
remember that for one of the shows our network - not the vendor stuff, 
just our core network - filled 43 eighteen wheeler truck/trailers.)

We also built some intentionally odd network elements - like using a 
barbed wire fence to carry twisted pair Ethernet - or building a RAID 
array out of USB flash drives driven via iSCSI over Wi-Fi.  I built an 
Ethernet segment that tried to elide the words "no" or "not" from a RTP 
based VoIP conversation - I never had enough processing horsepower to 
make that work, but I could inject words into a conversation.  And 
before I built my "flakeway" devices we used to have very large spools 
of single-mode fiber that we would use as delay lines to see what kind 
of effects delay would have.

My home network has had some strange configurations - like a dozen or so 
ISDN BRI's and the telco guys not knowing how many pairs to bring into 
the house - so now we have something like 50 copper pairs coming into 
the house. (We don't use any of them today.)  And then there was the 
time we had both a Cisco 7500 router and an equally huge Wellfleet 
router in the garage - those things were the size of a small car - and 
they drew so much power that we had to clamp to the big copper buss bars 
in the electrical panel.  (At one Interop show one of our routers - a 
Cisco 12000 - lit the lobby carpet on fire because the house 
electricians would not believe us when we told them how much power that 
monster drew.)

         --karl--