Videos The Alaska Server June 10, 2026 / June 18, 2026 by mark | Leave a Comment We recently pulled out this old 2U rackmount server. I set it up 10+ years ago as a personal file server, and recently realized the server wasn’t powering on. We determined the power supply had failed and then tried to figure out where this machine came from. With some help from our supporters, here’s what […] Read more » alaska dinastia mexmal tyan
Networking 3Com’s Three Losing Bets Against Novell May 7, 2026 by mark | Leave a Comment I ran across this article written by Bob Metcalfe in 1991 about 3Com’s losing bets against Novell. This contained an important fact in our research about Ethernet development in the 1980s. To summarize the article, those losing bets were: Thanks to David Strom who originally posted scans of this on his Happy 40th birthday, Ethernet […] Read more » 3com etherlink etherseries netware novell
Networking A 1988 performance comparison of PC LAN servers May 5, 2026 by mark | Leave a Comment In our 1980s networking research, we came across this: a 1988 paper out of the National University of Singapore where Gee-Swee Poo and Tiow-Seng Tan benchmarked the file server performance of 3Com 3Plus, Novell Advanced Netware 286, and IBM PC Network, all running on IBM PC ATs (plus the dedicated 3Com 3Server thrown in for […] Read more » 3com 3server ethernet netware novell
Uncategorized Triangle Universities Computation Center April 13, 2026 / April 13, 2026 by mark | Leave a Comment The Triangle Universities Computation Center was formed in 1966, a partnership between 3 universities in central NC to create computer time sharing services: Photo from Hickory Daily Record Sept 16 1968. Caption: Students, faculty and researchers at 38 North Carolina colleges and universities will be transmitting and receiving answers to thousands of problems daily this […] Read more »
Videos curl March 1, 2026 / March 1, 2026 by mark | Leave a Comment Most of us use curl daily without thinking about it. In our new video, we learn how Daniel Stenberg first got involved in programming and became the lead maintainer of curl. The story starts simpler than you might expect: an IRC bot built in the early 1990s to help manage some channels. That path led […] Read more » curl daniel stenberg
Videos 1995: The Year of the Virtual LAN November 27, 2025 / November 27, 2025 by mark | Leave a Comment VLANs VLANs are an everyday staple in networking today. We wanted to discover exactly how, and when, they came about. In everyday homelab/prosumer, small business and many enterprise networks, routers and switches use VLAN tags, which were defined by the 802.1Q standard. This feels like a concept that has been around forever, and I was […] Read more » 802.1q vlan
Videos Bonding 12x Modems October 4, 2025 / October 9, 2025 by mark | Leave a Comment Using modems has been close to the core of our focus in re-exploring 1990s tech since we started working on The Serial Port back in 2023. After we got our simulated dial-up ISP working, I had been thinking about doing a demo of combining multiple modems together. We knew multilink PPP was a thing – […] Read more »
Linux PXE Booting Debian Live June 4, 2025 / June 4, 2025 by mark I have an older Thinkpad laptop that I wanted to use in the lab for reading/writing pcmcia cards. I tried to replace the original HDD with a flash drive but ran into issues. Since the laptop has a built-in NIC with PXE support, I decided to try to get a live lightweight linux environment I […] Read more » debian lxde pxe
Networking Full BGP table in Linux with FRR May 2, 2025 / October 9, 2025 by mark | 2 Comments on Full BGP table in Linux with FRR For a project, we need to be able to simulate sending full Internet BGP routes to devices in our lab. While we could create a simulated table ourselves in a vacuum (i.e. 500k+ static routes in Linux then resdistribute with BGP), my natural inclination was to use a live Internet feed. How to get the […] Read more » bgp frr
Total Control Total Control: Netserver config September 26, 2024 / September 26, 2024 by mark | Leave a Comment Since we didn’t know the password, we flipped up dip switch 5 on the Netserver card and were then able to login to console as !root user and no password. Our firmware is: I’m now setting the password with: and then save all I powered off the unit, flipped dip switch 5 back down, and […] Read more »
