Author: ccie14023

Y2K

Posted by | Sep 15, 2020 | |

In 1998 I left my job as a computer “consultant” to pursue a master’s degree in Telecommunications Management.  I was stuck in my job, tired of troubleshooting people’s email clients and installing Word on their desktops, and was looking for a way to make a leap into bigger and better things.  That did happen–although not how I expected–but meanwhile for two years I needed to support myself while achieving my degree.  I took the easy path and stole a client from my previous employer.  This was at the height of the dotcom boom, and he was frankly too busy to even notice.  For a couple years I worked part-time at my advertising agency client, setting up computers, managing the servers, running the fairly simple network they had implemented.  It was a good deal for both of us, as the office manager had responsibility for IT and little inclination to work on technology. Anyone who was around back then will remember the “Y2K” scare.  As we approached the year 2000, someone realized that many computers had been storing the year part of dates with only the last two digits.  For example, a program would store “98” instead of “1998.”  This meant that, as we moved into the new millennium, the year 2001 would be interpreted by these systems to be “1901”.  A legitimate problem, to be sure.  Some software, such...

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Stay away from OOP

Posted by | Aug 12, 2020 | |

I’ve been revising my Cisco Live session on IOS XE programmability, and it’s made me think about programming in general, and a particular idea I’ve been embarrassed to admit I loathe: Object Oriented Programming. Some context:  I started programming on the Apple II+ in BASIC, which shows my age.  Back then programs were input with line numbers and program control was quite simple, consisting of GOTO and GOSUB statements that jumped around the lines of code.  So, you might have something that looked like this: 10 INPUT "Would you like to [C]opy a File or [D]elete a file?"; A$ 20 IF A$ = "C" THEN GOTO 100 30 IF A$ = "D" THEN GOTO 200 This was not really an elegant way to build programs, but it was fairly clear.  Given that code was entered directly into the DOS CLI with only line-by-line editing functionality, it could certainly get a bit confusing what happened and where when you had a lot of branches in your code. In college I took one programming course in Pascal.  Pascal was similar in structure to C, just far more verbose.  Using it required a shift to procedural-style thinking, and while I was able to get a lot of code to work in Pascal, my professor was always dinging me for style mistakes.  I tended to revert to AppleSoft BASIC style coding, using global...

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TAC Tales #20: Crash, burn, and exit

Posted by | Apr 3, 2020 | |

I’ve mentioned before that, despite being on the Routing Protocols team, I spent a lot of time handling crash cases in TAC.  At the time, my queue was just a dumping ground for cases that didn’t fit into any other bucket in the High Touch structure.  Backbone TAC had a much more granular division of teams, including a team entirely dedicated to crash.  But in HTTS, we did it all. Some crashes are minor, like a (back then) 2600-series router reloading due to a bus error.  Some were catastrophic, particularly crashes on large chassis-type routing systems in service provider networks.  These could have hundreds of interfaces, and with sub-interfaces, potentially thousands of customers affected by a single outage.  Chassis platforms vary in their architecture, but many of the platforms we ran at the time used a distributed architecture in which the individual line cards ran a subset of IOS.  Thus, unlike a 2600 which had “dumb” WIC cards for interface connections, on chassis systems line cards themselves could crash in addition to the route processors.  Oftentimes, when a line card crashed, the effect would cascade through the box, with multiple line cards crashing, which would result in a massive meltdown. The 7500 was particularly prone to these.  A workhorse of Cisco’s early product line, the 7500 line cards ran IOS but forwarded packets between each other by placing them...

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The tech industry and the worship of the new

Posted by | Mar 26, 2020 | |

“Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.” –  Ogden Nash The book The Innovator’s Dilemma appears on the desk of a lot of Silicon Valley executives.  Its author, Clayton Christiensen, is famous for having coined the term “disruptive innovation.”  The term has always bothered me, and I keep waiting for the word “disruption” to die a quiet death.  I have the disadvantage of having studied Latin quite a bit.  The word “disrupt” comes from the Latin verb rumpere, which means to “break up”, “tear”, “rend”, “break into pieces.”  The word, as does our English derivative, connotes something quite bad.  If you think “disruption” is good, what would you think if I disrupted a presentation you were giving?  What if I disrupted the electrical system of your heart? Side note:  I’m fascinated with the tendency of modern English to use “bad” words to connote something good.  In the 1980’s the word “bad” actually came to mean its opposite.  “Wow, that dude is really bad!” meant he was good.  Cool people use the word “sick” in this way.  “That’s a sick chopper” does not mean the motorcycle is broken. The point, then, of disruption is to break up something that already exists, and this is what lies beneath the b-school usage of it.  If you innovate, in a disruptive way, then you are destroying something that came before you–an...

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Before the Internet: The Bulletin Board System II

Posted by | Mar 23, 2020 | |

In my last post, I discussed the BBS and how it worked.  (It would be helpful to review, to understand the terminology.)  In this post, I have resurrected, in part, the BBS I used to run from 1988-1990.  It was called “The Tower”, for no particularly good reason except that it sounded cool to my teenage mind. Now, bringing this back to life was no simple task, but was aided by some foresight I had 20 years ago.  I had a Mac with a disk drive, and realizing the floppy era was coming to a close, I decided to produce disk images of all the 3.5 inch floppies I had saved from my Apple II days.  Fortunately, my last Apple II, the IIGS, used 3.5″ drives instead of the 5.25″ that were more common on the Apple IIs.  The Macs that had floppy drives all had 3.5″ drives.  Additionally, Apple had included software to on the pre OSX MacOS to read ProDOS (Apple II) disks.  Thus, in the year 2000, I could mount an Apple II floppy from a dozen years prior and make an image out of it. I did not have a full working version of my GBBS, however, so I had to download a copy.  I also had to do a lot of work to bring it up to Macos (not MacOS, but Macos, Modified ACOS),...

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