Re: TCP/IP routing

re union labor: at the Star launch at NCC Chicago,1981, the experienced
show guys carried a roll of $100 bills for paying off the union guys.
Otherwise your power would mysteriously go out.

On Wed, May 6, 2026 at 5:43 PM Karl Auerbach via Internet-history <
[email protected]> wrote:

>
> 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--
>
>
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