I worked for geocities as a front end person back then. We got to work on some cool javascript stuff for the page builder app that was really pretty far ahead for its time. I got into trouble for bringing a laptop with suse linux on it into the office, back then linux was considered a major security risk, you notice all the machines are from Sun. They were also very early adopters of server side java, but most of the plumbing was composed of c code, the javascript people were kept far away from the server side and we didn't make it up to yahoo, but they did snatch up almost all of the unix admins.
Wow, Page builder (formerly Geobuilder) -- crazy times. I don't remember the Suse incident! But your mention of server side java reminds me that we also experimented with server side javascript via Netscape Enterprise Server. Compared to the C CGIs that comprised most of Geo's backend at that point it seemed a panacea. Too many bugs and not ready for prime time later we stuck w/ Apache (but moved more to handlers).
Great memories. During this era, I was at Citysearch and spent a lot of time in the Orange County Exodus DC. We had a nice rack of Sun gear, Extreme Networks switches and Alteon AceDirector load balancers.
I remember vividly that there was a cage down the row from us that was populated entirely by eMachines, which were a low end desktop PC that you could buy at Circuit City and Best Buy. We laughed at their cage but the company, 911gifts.com, ended up getting acquired for a nice sum, while our site and company was basically gone a few years later.
That's a great story. It'd be interesting to know whether that was all they could afford, or if they were being very forward-thinking in using COTS hardware and a failure-tolerant architecture.
I love seeing stuff like this. Though I'd be a happy man if I never had to see the words "Veritas Volume Manager" again. Definitely one of my least favorite pieces of software from that era.
I worked for a company around this same time that had servers in the NJ Exodus data center. Used to have to head up there once a month to swap out tapes in the Sun L11000.
Brought back some memories for me as well. In corporate IT, unix sysadmins had to know how to manage multiple different hardware architectures and operating systems that all did things different. AIX, Solaris, HPUX, Ultrix, etc, all with different filesystems, raid hw/sw, command paths, and so on.
That picture of the ethernet hornet's nest too. Ugh. At least it wasn't AUI cabling.
We were hosted at Exodus in the Herndon Virginia area around this same timeframe. The staff gave us a small tour and showed us a cage about the size of a double-wide trailer. Inside were two Sun Enterprise 10000 servers and a whole wall of drive arrays. Plus networking gear, tape drives, etc. Easily $7-8 million worth of stuff.
They said it was from a search engine we probably had heard of. Our guess was it was Altavista.
We didn't own our Compaq servers - we leased them from Exodus, like a lot of firms. And when the bubble popped, all those startups stopped paying for all that expensive equipment (which was now used and worth much less), and Exodus was on the hook as the owner of it all. Killed them.
Edit: Found this image from someone who picked one up for a song to add to their collection. From a prized million-dollar enterprise-class server, to being hauled around in the back of a pickup truck.
I think all colos say crap like that. During a tour at switch, they pointed to a large cage and said, "It's a search engine that you all have heard about but I cannot name."
A week later, in Atlanta at QTS metro, they said almost the exact same words.
"As you can imagine (and see from these pictures), this equates to a whole bunch of ethernet cables. Cable management gets increasingly difficult to grasp each time a new box is added to the mix"
Eeeeeek. I'm not in IT and I got the sinking stomach feeling when looking at this.
That mess wasn't common in any environment I worked at during the same time period. Pretty sure that would have got someone sacked in the various datacenters I happen to have worked in.
I seem to recall the adjacent cage hosting a Very Large Company's hot web-based email product which was cabled "organically" and made this look like art. (Hi Mike!)
So much memories from that era. I saw my first 1TB storage array back then, it was an EMC Clariion fibre channel raid box, it cost nearly 1m$ and it was a full rack of 9GB dual-ported 15k RPM disks.
We had an IBM ESS "Shark" back then. A fantastic piece of kit but totally overkill for us in the end. It was basically the size of two or three standard racks, full of shelves for drives, and two RS/6000 AIX servers, and trays of redundant controllers.
You could pull trays of drives, one of the RS/6000's, or any of the controllers, and it'd keep on humming along thanks to redundancy pretty much everywhere. If any components went bad it'd call home to IBM via a modem.
And it could do things like automatic mirroring to a remote site.
1.5TB was a common configuration, but you could connect multiple boxes to increase capacity.
I had forgot that GeoCities started migrating to NetApp filers after the Yahoo! acquisition. As many thousands (tens of thousands?) of the filers they bought from NetApp, Yahoo! really shouldve bought them when they had the chance I feel.
There used to be a lot of nice material on this subject but a lot of it has been obsolete and rotted away from the web over the last 15-20 years. The larger dial-up ISPs used Cisco AS series boxes (or equivalent) with PRI (i.e.: phone over T1) connections (24 lines/each) to a centralized RADIUS server for authentication. They are/were the last hold outs providing dial up.
Smaller ISPs were more of a '94 to '99 thing. Usually they used cyclades or equivalent serial port cards with up to 16 serial ports per card and an external modem per port. Eventually this morphed into boxes with multiple modems in them and access servers that did the ppp termination and the authentication (to a RADIUS server) as scale increased. US Robotics was probably the best reputed player in the modem space.
I'll dig up photos of the ISP I founded back in 1993. I've got the evolution of it from 1993 till I sold it in 97, but they were all film photos for obvious reasons. Surprised I never took the time to post before.
I can't speak for early early dial up infrastructure, but by the turn of the century the equipment involved was not all that impressive to look at.
A typical configuration would terminate the analogue lines over ISDN, which supported somewhere up to 30 B channels ('voice calls') over a single cable, running alongside one or two Ethernet cables to a single router with one or more modem option cards installed.
I worked for a large UK organisation that had cut back on their dialup access but still had 50 or so modems in racks for field workers to dial in to to get their email etc. Also some site to site links remained a dialup connection.
Sorry, no fancy pictures or anything interesting, just reminded me of the time.
I worked at a couple of small ISPs in the mid 90's, and built the dialup infrastructure of one from scratch. I remember using Xylogics Annex terminal servers connected to either 16 or 32 individual USR modems. There were stacks of modems, each with its own power brick, serial, and RJ-11 connection.
This was a few years before everything went digital with PRI lines (T1s that let you do digital modems, basically.)
Everyone in SV in 1999 used Sun boxes. Racking Ultra-2 Pizza Boxes was being very Internet Professional and money was flowing freely enough to pay for them.
Does anyone remember where an Exodus colo facility was in SF around that same time (1999-2001)? That was my first visit to the area and I can't seem to locate the neighborhood now that I live here.
shams93|9 years ago
dkresge|9 years ago
chrissnell|9 years ago
I remember vividly that there was a cage down the row from us that was populated entirely by eMachines, which were a low end desktop PC that you could buy at Circuit City and Best Buy. We laughed at their cage but the company, 911gifts.com, ended up getting acquired for a nice sum, while our site and company was basically gone a few years later.
alexhawdon|9 years ago
scurvy|9 years ago
staked|9 years ago
I worked for a company around this same time that had servers in the NJ Exodus data center. Used to have to head up there once a month to swap out tapes in the Sun L11000.
tyingq|9 years ago
That picture of the ethernet hornet's nest too. Ugh. At least it wasn't AUI cabling.
roganp|9 years ago
chiph|9 years ago
They said it was from a search engine we probably had heard of. Our guess was it was Altavista.
We didn't own our Compaq servers - we leased them from Exodus, like a lot of firms. And when the bubble popped, all those startups stopped paying for all that expensive equipment (which was now used and worth much less), and Exodus was on the hook as the owner of it all. Killed them.
Edit: Found this image from someone who picked one up for a song to add to their collection. From a prized million-dollar enterprise-class server, to being hauled around in the back of a pickup truck.
http://imgur.com/a/lXvOk
nokahn|9 years ago
A week later, in Atlanta at QTS metro, they said almost the exact same words.
drewg123|9 years ago
Maybe it was Inktomi? I'm pretty sure they used Sun hardware.
joezydeco|9 years ago
Eeeeeek. I'm not in IT and I got the sinking stomach feeling when looking at this.
Thankfully there is https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn/ to cure that.
tyingq|9 years ago
dkresge|9 years ago
acveilleux|9 years ago
vidarh|9 years ago
You could pull trays of drives, one of the RS/6000's, or any of the controllers, and it'd keep on humming along thanks to redundancy pretty much everywhere. If any components went bad it'd call home to IBM via a modem.
And it could do things like automatic mirroring to a remote site.
1.5TB was a common configuration, but you could connect multiple boxes to increase capacity.
roganp|9 years ago
jsjohnst|9 years ago
Overtonwindow|9 years ago
acveilleux|9 years ago
https://www.patton.com/technotes/build_yourself_an_isp.pdf
http://www.gwi.net/behind-the-scenes-of-a-90s-internet-start...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8352432
The absolute minimum, and representative of the very first dial-up ISPs: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2025
http://www.datamation.com/erp/article.php/615281/My-own-priv...
There used to be a lot of nice material on this subject but a lot of it has been obsolete and rotted away from the web over the last 15-20 years. The larger dial-up ISPs used Cisco AS series boxes (or equivalent) with PRI (i.e.: phone over T1) connections (24 lines/each) to a centralized RADIUS server for authentication. They are/were the last hold outs providing dial up.
Smaller ISPs were more of a '94 to '99 thing. Usually they used cyclades or equivalent serial port cards with up to 16 serial ports per card and an external modem per port. Eventually this morphed into boxes with multiple modems in them and access servers that did the ppp termination and the authentication (to a RADIUS server) as scale increased. US Robotics was probably the best reputed player in the modem space.
jsjohnst|9 years ago
_wmd|9 years ago
A typical configuration would terminate the analogue lines over ISDN, which supported somewhere up to 30 B channels ('voice calls') over a single cable, running alongside one or two Ethernet cables to a single router with one or more modem option cards installed.
We had Cisco boxes in the last place I worked that handled dialup, looking pretty much like this: http://www.ciscomax.com/datasheets/3600/Cisco_3640.jpg
alex_hitchins|9 years ago
Sorry, no fancy pictures or anything interesting, just reminded me of the time.
icedchai|9 years ago
This was a few years before everything went digital with PRI lines (T1s that let you do digital modems, basically.)
RamenJunkie_|9 years ago
biofox|9 years ago
hogrammer|9 years ago
sulam|9 years ago
acveilleux|9 years ago
stpe|9 years ago
unknown|9 years ago
[deleted]
tenaciousJk|9 years ago
Does anyone remember where an Exodus colo facility was in SF around that same time (1999-2001)? That was my first visit to the area and I can't seem to locate the neighborhood now that I live here.
AWildDHHAppears|9 years ago
[deleted]