[c-nsp] Ode to the old days

[Charles Sprickman]

> On Dec 8, 2016, at 5:26 PM, Nick Hilliard <nick at foobar.org> wrote:
> 
> Gert Doering wrote:
>> And vendors that actually cared what their users asked for (at least
>> if you offered some money as bait).  And understood protocol specs.
> 
> URTROLL
> 
> I still, ironically, have a Xylogics T shirt buried away somewhere
> because of the rage they caused me a very, very long time ago indeed.
> No indication about caring.  No understanding of how a protocol should
> work. Basic bugs.  Awful, the lot of it.

Thanks for mentioning that name.  Now I’m going to have nightmares.

My path from support to sysadmin took me to the hardware no one else
wanted to touch - Annex 3 and Annex 4000(?) from Xylogics.  There were
maybe about 4 of them total with a bunch of modems hanging off of them
for dialup access.  This predated affordable bulk modem gear from USR
and Ascend.

Total junk.  Printed manuals that included shit that did not exist in the CLI,
terrible, terrible support, ridiculously overpriced cable assemblies that 
never seemed to really stay seated well even when screwed in.  And the
big one, is that if you hit the thing with a bunch of ICMP traffic (say, some
kiddie at a university doing a “ping -f” to anything beyond the box, like a
dialup user) the box would just panic with an “out of mbufs” message.

They could not give two shits about that one, and it wasn’t fixed in the
lifetime of the equipment at our shop…

Charles

> 
> The practices are the same.  The quality is the same. The names are
> different.
> 
> Nick
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