Two articles (here and here) in my Netstalgia series covered the old bulletin board system (BBS) I used to operate back in the late 1980’s. It wasn’t much by today’s standards, but I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a Sysop (systems operator). How the BBS died is a lesson in product management. My BBS ran […]
Category: NetStalgia
A night of vi
It was four o’clock in the early hours of one Sunday morning in 2001. I had been up all night sitting in our data center at the San Francisco Chronicle with our Unix guy. He was handing off responsibility for managing the firewalls to the network team, and he was walking me through the setup. […]
It is the network
When I worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, I started a project to bring Internet connectivity to a number of sites that had only limited mainframe circuits. To do this I decided to get DSL lines and run IPSec over them, a relatively new way of doing things for the time. It was a lot […]
My first Ethernet Network and Router
I’ve mentioned in the past how my first job in IT (starting in 1995) was as a “systems administrator” for a small company in Marin County, California. The company designed and built museum exhibits, and its team of around 60 employees was split between fabricators, who built the exhibits, and office workers. Some of the […]
Remote Access
As a part of my job at Cisco I’ve been looking into Zscaler and their offerings. It started me thinking back to the early days of remote access, and I figured it would make a good topic for Netstalgia. I wrote in the past about how bulletin board systems (BBSs) work, and in another article […]
A nauseating outage
When I worked for the Gold partner I generally serviced clients in the San Francisco Bay Area, but because we were a national partner I was occasionally called to other locations around the country. Being a double CCIE who had worked in TAC, I had a unique skill set among our engineers, which was often […]
For the love of wiring
We’ve moved into a wireless world, which is too bad for me because I love, more than anything, wiring. I miss the days of good old Cat 3 cable, T1 lines, and ISDN BRIs. I miss 66 blocks, punch down tools, cross-connect wire, and tone/probe kits. And butt sets. Especially butt sets. Now I just […]
Painted into a corner
I’ve written before about my years at the San Francisco Chronicle, my first job which was exclusively network engineering. It was an interesting environment, as this was back in the years before the Internet totally displaced newspapers. We had printing plants to support, active newsrooms with reporters and photographers, and a massive circulation operation. When […]
One big /8
I thought I’d take break from Cisco Live to relive some memories in another Netstalgia. Working in product management at a Cisco business unit, we are constantly talking about the latest and greatest, the cutting edge of technology. It’s easy to forget how many customers out there are nowhere near the cutting edge. They’re not […]
How not to do Internet Connectivity
My first IT job was at a small company in Novato, California, that designed and built museum exhibits. At the time most companies either designed the exhibits or built them, but ours was the only one that did both. You could separate the services, and just do one or the other, but our end-to-end model […]