On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 5:16 PM, Michuki Mwangi <michuki@swiftkenya.com> wrote:

Steve,

Steve Muchai wrote:
> C'mon dinosaurs, share your experiences!! Mich, Brian, Wash, Wycliffe,
> Okechukwu....where are you?
>
lol! ... you clearly dont want us started on all that past ....

Anyways, first i had radius running and the backup was on my desktop pc
(on a windows box). I learned that after some incident with one of the
servers, so i rebuilt the second one on my PC to keep working before we
could restore the primary. With time i finally put it on a spare server
(all windows).

I also had to deal with dual logins - and had to get a tool that would
kick out the second logged in person. Before finally upgrading to some
radius that understood single logins.

Anyone recall Lucent Portmaster 2 with 30 serial ports?. That was the
master of all dialups.

Then some clients with email servers on dialup we had to assign a static
IP so that they could do ETRN for email forwarding.

Bu then again we had lines everywhere and having a roaming IP was a
nightmare on network that was fully static IP routing!.

Some clients had bad dialin lines so we had to reduce their MTU on
dialup - Folks from Karen we could actually hear KBC radio on just
placing the receiver on the ear.

Winsock dll - what was that?

Tumetoka mbali! :)

Mich

This is truly nostalgic!

Those RS232 cables on several racks of MultiTech/Zyxel modems which kept on hanging because of insufficient cooling in squeezed server rooms. Air conditioners were expensive so fans would do. We never did Windows servers though, having inherited some 2nd hand hardware (MD used to boast of those having been used by US military before!), running some BSDi Unix.
Do you guys remember how prestigious it was to get a Unix shell account and do "talk smuchai" during one of those events where you had to provide Internet via dialup? Did that severally at Muthaiga Gold Club.
There were moments we had to install Windows 3.11 (for workgroups) and Windows 95 (12 diskettes, were they??). I don't quite remember if Microsoft existed, apart from the fact that they developed Windows. Licenses were not an issue then. Woe unto you if one of the diskettes could not be read:-)
And then DUN would simply refuse to work. Someone developed a tool called Trumpet Winsock. And noisy lines? AT&FS10=50 custom init string ????

Off to get some cold beer:-)