End of the ISDN Era

If anybody is looking for some used ISDN stuff, NCC has a few interesting items on eBay right now. We’re selling an old Ascend Pipe 50 and a Netgear ISDN modem. And if you like really old stuff, we’re selling a Hayes ISDN adapter – it’s not very fast but it would make a nice POTS adapter so you could use your phone on the ISDN line. Check out our eBay listings if you’re interested.

Fun with Host Naming Schemes

There’s a great Slashdot article on host naming schemes today. It talks about the struggle of smart people who want to give their machines useful and fun names based on consistant naming schemes such as Soviet leaders (Leonid, Yuri, etc.) or French Wines (Pauillac, Pomerol, etc.) versus stupid managment types who want to give them meaningless and confusing names like xyzibm34211, xyzspc25502. It’s loads of fun to read about all the crazy naming systems people have come up with. And I’d never realized there were any RFC’s on creating host naming systems but there are two. RFC1178 gives a lot of useful and interesting guidelines for creating a naming system and RFC2100 is, well, worth reading anyway.

The host names at NCC are all creatures from Science Fiction. Triffid, Horta, Nimon, Rodan, Mothra, Vorta, Ferengi, Krynoid, Vorlon, Zanti, and Wirrin so far with more to come. Eventually we hope to give each host a web page of it’s own explaining the origin of the name. We only have a couple of them up so far as you can see from the links above but more will go up as time allows.

The one problem at NCC is that Randy still names all of his machines wrr[something] – in violation of multiple provisions of RFC1178 it seems. Maybe he’ll read the article and become enlightened.

ISP Finger Pointing

We’ve been having continued troubles with our new T1. Verio blames Worldcom, Worldcom blames Southwestern Bell. And Southwestern Bell blames Verio. So far none of them have been able to find the actual cause of our problems. SWB switched out our Adtrans smartjack yesterday and Verio swapped out our Cisco 1700 router. So far no downtime but it’s gone for two to three days without problems before so we’ll just have to see. Meanwhile, I’m about to pay a visit to the Dentist so today is off to a wonderful start.

The T1 is Working

After a lot of 3-way conference calls between Verio, Worldcom, and myself, we seem to have nailed down the last of the problems with the new T1 line. We’ve had a few hours of downtime over the last couple of days but things should be pretty stable from here on out.

Perl Code and Dialups

I’ve spent the last several days writing boatloads of Perl code on two projects at once. A demo of one of the two projects is going to be shown tomorrow so I should really be coding instead of updating my home page.

Our T1 is still a few days from being operational and the whole office is being routed through a single 56k dialup – I can’t believe people actually survive using these things all the time! The slow access is driving me insane and it’s only been a little over a week.