I looked around to see if she looked around ... or the story of how I was my provider in the early 2000s
The Internet in our city appeared standard - in the form of a state-owned monopolist of communications, which arranged a modem pool of several dozen channels. Access to the World Wide Web did not come out of nowhere - the Fidonet network had been flourishing for several years now, with as many as three nodes and up to a hundred subscribers-points. I don’t remember my point number anymore, but somewhere in the archives on the disks a selection of the necessary software is still gathering dust - tosser, golded, advanced “dialers” and so on.
So many had modems, as well as a desire to quickly join the global network.
')
I remember my first access to the network as if it was only yesterday - after midnight (when the connection is least of all people and cleaner), with my ear to the dynamics of the US Robotics Sportster 14400, successfully turned into a Courier 33600 by one local, listening to handshake and breathless. The first loaded page - oddly enough, the FBI website, was just a magazine near at hand, and there was an article about the fact that the FBI website posted a list of MOST WANTED, I really wanted to look at it :). I even printed the first page to show my friends - everyone was eager to look HOW IT was there.
Very quickly, the urban modem pool began to be missed - there were clearly more people willing to get into the Internet at a specific point in time than those who wanted to get out of it - the access to the world wide web was delayed in earnest ... In addition, the main urban commercial enterprises just as quickly figured out all the benefits from connecting to the Internet and hurried to acquire their own "unlimited" subscriber connections, finally narrowing the number of available modem lines for the public. In this context, the notion of “unlimited connection” should be understood as unlimited in time - very few people thought about the costs of traffic passing through the modem, it was ridiculous by today's standards. A channel of 1-2 megabits could easily provide the city with 100 thousand inhabitants with “normal” (at that time) Internet, and the cost of telephone calls around the city was zero.
Time passed, the question did not dare. Commercial providers did not appear - only the “highways” that had recently appeared in the country could afford to drag their channel into the city, but they were primarily trying to build a backbone network between major cities and our town was temporarily out of business.
At that time, I worked at the factory as a full-time IT officer. We had a small farm - only about 30 cars. The Internet was only on one, the head of one of the divisions, which the Internet was most needed. If someone from the office staff needed access to the Internet, he would bow to him. Needless to say, this head of department enjoyed universal respect.
After some time, the office people "got involved", many had their own mailboxes, and some even got home Internet and even without that worsening the situation with free city modem lines. Just then I finally managed to get the money out for a separate server - my network was no longer peer-to-peer. Windows 2000 came out on time, eliminating the need to deploy NetWare, although honestly, I liked the latter. On the new server, the domain controller was solemnly raised, the local file-cleaner was set up, the “bugs” moved from their 1C to the terminals (good for the 2000th Microsoft made them in the form of “zamanihi” free under license). To facilitate office life on the server, it was also decided to hoist Kerio WinRoute, which finally gave the opportunity to use the Internet to each employee. The connection went up through the full-time RAS service in Windows 2000 (a component of the Routing and Remote Access service), which monitored attempts to sneak into the Internet and, in the event of that, pulled the modem to dial. It was a necessary measure, because Two analog modems IDC IDC-5614 BXL / VR hung on one telephone line, one for the Internet and the other for one of the two Client-Bank systems (the second, more important, was on a separate line).
“The main ones on the Internet” in our city were a couple of engineers of the state communications monopolist. In honor they were great, to be friends with them was considered in our environment "computer scientists" the key to a successful and uninterrupted connection. Corruption, as now, existed everywhere and in just a small package of brandy and sweets it was possible to comfortably spend the whole weekend on the Internet with the guarantee that you will call and not be torn off.
Once, having come to these guys “to smoke”, one of them mentioned that there is still one free port in their modem pool, but there is no modem in it, and the administration does not want to give money to it. And then we got successfully spam came to us, or rather then it was not spam at all, but a specific business quotation. Spam was not yet there; everything that arrived by mail was read as usual paper correspondence. The proposal was about a marvelous thing - an xDSL modem that could work on top of an ordinary analog telephone line, and even let ordinary phones or other modems stay on it. In addition, the speed of 115k seemed absolutely fantastic - in fact, the limit of the UART on the “bundle”.
The stars in the sky finally coincided literally in a day, when the director called to himself and asked if it was possible to do something with the Internet so that it would not slow down.
Another two weeks of waiting and a box with a coveted device - the Pilgrim modem arrived at our factory (the photo shows the remaining subscriber part):
The first impression was shock: the appearance of the device, the body of which was made of 1mm sheet steel, did not inspire confidence in high-tech equipment. There were two devices in the box - a subscriber modem (the one on the photo) and its even more miserable looking station part, intended for installation in some of its own, unique rack. Throughout the design, the spirit of defense conversion was clearly felt, the modem case tank armor was a witness. The station modem was immediately assigned to the provider where it was examined by a council of several local luminaries in the field of communications and solemnly plugged into that very single free port. Upon returning to work, the subscriber modem met my server’s COM port and then ... a miracle happened. Everything worked almost the first time, I didn’t even believe that everything turned out to be so simple.
The Internet at the plant “took off” - after a measly 10-15 to a stable 115k seemed like a real jerk of technical progress. Particularly pleased was the accounting department, which now did not need to announce the entire factory office as before with cries of “we want to be a customer-baaank! ..”. The new connection made a reality that it was practically impossible before - a whole movie could be downloaded over the weekend (by the way, the first downloaded movie was The Matrix, which hints), and the sites opened at almost the speed with which the server gave them. The “walkers” reached out to the plant with requests to download something for friendship and for swag, and the city IT establishment tried to ask for a visit and see how it all worked.
The initial impression about “Pilgrim” turned out to be sharply erroneous - the modem worked reliably like a rock, as long as I remember its operation - it never stopped. In addition, its steel armored housing ambiguously hinted that the Internet will work for us, even if the ceiling in the server room collapses. Over time, I dragged the distribution of the Internet from a domain controller under Windows to FreeBSD version 3. The “classic” ipfw & squid were raised, the shaper was delivered to users, forbidden sites were primitively spelled out. Yes, yes, already at that time I had to mercilessly punish the fans to shake the film during the working day or to watch pornographic pictures that the management did not like.
As time went on, requests grew. I didn’t want good Internet not only at work, but also at home, and there wasn’t any alternative providers in the city. In addition, my situation was complicated by the fact that my home landline phone was in a park with my neighbor, a babusya divine dandelion, whose main entertainment was in very frequent calls to its many children, grandchildren and girlfriends, and as always, at the most inopportune moment. Especially grandmother often liked to call out on duty at weekends, and sometimes conversations could really drag on continuously half a day.
Then it was impossible to put up with all this disgrace, besides the salaries were then small and the Internet payment was in fact a considerable part of it. By that time, one of the two existing client-bank lines had been completely freed, which made it possible for the IDC-5614 BXL / VR modem to service it to take more important work — work in my home instead of US Robotics, yet IDC was (honor and praise to him) a great all-terrain vehicle on domestic communication lines. The same modem, which previously served the factory office for Internet access, was gathering peacefully near the server in case anything happened to Pilgrim. The third modem in accounting and hung himself on the client-bank system.
The solution came as Mendeleev, in a dream ...
The idea appeared in the form of a diagram. Certainly not in the format of MS Visio 2013, but still not in the form of an electrical principle :)
The meaning of the work of this whole chain was as follows.
Two modems were connected to the server (in the old scheme, when everything fit on one server): Pilgrim XDSL, which provided the office with Internet access and analog IDC-5614 BLX / VR (let's call it “myself-ISP ") Configured (via an AT command) to automatically pick up the phone in case of an incoming call and establish a connection. One more modem IDC-5614 BLX / VR was stuck into the telephone line between these modems, it was connected directly to a computer in the accounting department and serviced the client-bank system. Since he worked on top of DSL, the accounting department at any time could get in touch with the bank without interrupting the permanent office connection to the Internet. A special domain account was created on the domain controller server, in the properties of which a specific internal IP address was specified in the Dial-Up setting and the Dial-Up connection itself was actually allowed.
On weekdays, the “self-ISP” modem was inactive, posing as a backup line to the Internet in the eyes of the authorities in the event of a “Pilgrim” failure, which was true in principle - to reconfigure it for this task was a matter of five minutes. But after work or on weekends the most interesting began.
I dialed from home to the line number of our client-bank office system (she had her own city phone number), the dialing signal passed through Pilgrim and the “bukh” modem to the self-to-ISP modem without difficulty, he shot the connection was established, as a result of which my home PC got access to the internal network of the enterprise and, at the same time, to high-quality Internet, since the routing and access control service together with Kerio WinRoute was configured to NAT my packets into the Internet connection channel, . to the network connection on the server, personified by the Pilgrim modem. The conditional traffic route is shown in the diagram by red arrows - it turned out like in that famous song “... I looked around to see if she looked back, to see if I looked around ...” - just the same hymn of recursion.
At the same time, I did not pay a dime for the connection to the Internet arranged in this way - per-minute billing of city calls to our analog city PBX appeared a decade later.
The only problem was the human factor of the grandmother of God dandelion. I repent, I had to act cruelly. No, nothing happened to Grandma.
The persuasion of granny that de is sometimes necessary and others to give to talk - had no action. If at the weekend she began to arrange her traditional incessant conversations from morning to evening, she had to be forced to cut her off by crossing the blocker, which fortunately was located in my apartment. I was seriously afraid that one day my grandmother would need the phone not only for a banal talker, but for, say, an ambulance call, so I didn’t arrange the trick with the lock on a weekday until midnight. In addition, I set up my home modem on a permanently on speaker, which made it possible to listen to the reason for the next Granny call - in the case of an emergency call, I would not wait for the break and immediately disconnect myself, freeing the line. The situation finally resolved itself in a month - the grandmother several times called telephone operators, who only threw up their hands, and then she managed to pry our telephone monopolist so much that she was finally given a separate line.
For two years I enjoyed quality free Internet without sudden breaks and with guaranteed speed, causing the envy of my acquaintances, until I decided to move to the capital, where by that time the beginnings of mass broadband Internet had arisen and numerous pioneers pulled their copper through sleeping areas.
As for the good old "Pilgrim" - the modem worked without a single complaint for several years, finally visiting as a backup and emergency channel until it received a new decent change in the form of optics and was not placed in a closet to the warehouse of old equipment, from which it was recently removed at my request, at my request, former colleagues didn’t take a memory photo for Habr.
Now, after so many years, when in my apartment there are two full-fledged symmetrical 100Mbit / s SLA channels to the world, all these “offshore” Internet connection schemes in my dreams seem to be a matter of bygone days, essentially an Internet childhood. But that was, that was, now it is history.
So many had modems, as well as a desire to quickly join the global network.
')
I remember my first access to the network as if it was only yesterday - after midnight (when the connection is least of all people and cleaner), with my ear to the dynamics of the US Robotics Sportster 14400, successfully turned into a Courier 33600 by one local, listening to handshake and breathless. The first loaded page - oddly enough, the FBI website, was just a magazine near at hand, and there was an article about the fact that the FBI website posted a list of MOST WANTED, I really wanted to look at it :). I even printed the first page to show my friends - everyone was eager to look HOW IT was there.
Very quickly, the urban modem pool began to be missed - there were clearly more people willing to get into the Internet at a specific point in time than those who wanted to get out of it - the access to the world wide web was delayed in earnest ... In addition, the main urban commercial enterprises just as quickly figured out all the benefits from connecting to the Internet and hurried to acquire their own "unlimited" subscriber connections, finally narrowing the number of available modem lines for the public. In this context, the notion of “unlimited connection” should be understood as unlimited in time - very few people thought about the costs of traffic passing through the modem, it was ridiculous by today's standards. A channel of 1-2 megabits could easily provide the city with 100 thousand inhabitants with “normal” (at that time) Internet, and the cost of telephone calls around the city was zero.
Time passed, the question did not dare. Commercial providers did not appear - only the “highways” that had recently appeared in the country could afford to drag their channel into the city, but they were primarily trying to build a backbone network between major cities and our town was temporarily out of business.
At that time, I worked at the factory as a full-time IT officer. We had a small farm - only about 30 cars. The Internet was only on one, the head of one of the divisions, which the Internet was most needed. If someone from the office staff needed access to the Internet, he would bow to him. Needless to say, this head of department enjoyed universal respect.
After some time, the office people "got involved", many had their own mailboxes, and some even got home Internet and even without that worsening the situation with free city modem lines. Just then I finally managed to get the money out for a separate server - my network was no longer peer-to-peer. Windows 2000 came out on time, eliminating the need to deploy NetWare, although honestly, I liked the latter. On the new server, the domain controller was solemnly raised, the local file-cleaner was set up, the “bugs” moved from their 1C to the terminals (good for the 2000th Microsoft made them in the form of “zamanihi” free under license). To facilitate office life on the server, it was also decided to hoist Kerio WinRoute, which finally gave the opportunity to use the Internet to each employee. The connection went up through the full-time RAS service in Windows 2000 (a component of the Routing and Remote Access service), which monitored attempts to sneak into the Internet and, in the event of that, pulled the modem to dial. It was a necessary measure, because Two analog modems IDC IDC-5614 BXL / VR hung on one telephone line, one for the Internet and the other for one of the two Client-Bank systems (the second, more important, was on a separate line).
“The main ones on the Internet” in our city were a couple of engineers of the state communications monopolist. In honor they were great, to be friends with them was considered in our environment "computer scientists" the key to a successful and uninterrupted connection. Corruption, as now, existed everywhere and in just a small package of brandy and sweets it was possible to comfortably spend the whole weekend on the Internet with the guarantee that you will call and not be torn off.
Once, having come to these guys “to smoke”, one of them mentioned that there is still one free port in their modem pool, but there is no modem in it, and the administration does not want to give money to it. And then we got successfully spam came to us, or rather then it was not spam at all, but a specific business quotation. Spam was not yet there; everything that arrived by mail was read as usual paper correspondence. The proposal was about a marvelous thing - an xDSL modem that could work on top of an ordinary analog telephone line, and even let ordinary phones or other modems stay on it. In addition, the speed of 115k seemed absolutely fantastic - in fact, the limit of the UART on the “bundle”.
The stars in the sky finally coincided literally in a day, when the director called to himself and asked if it was possible to do something with the Internet so that it would not slow down.
Another two weeks of waiting and a box with a coveted device - the Pilgrim modem arrived at our factory (the photo shows the remaining subscriber part):
I apologize for the great photos taken on the phone
The first impression was shock: the appearance of the device, the body of which was made of 1mm sheet steel, did not inspire confidence in high-tech equipment. There were two devices in the box - a subscriber modem (the one on the photo) and its even more miserable looking station part, intended for installation in some of its own, unique rack. Throughout the design, the spirit of defense conversion was clearly felt, the modem case tank armor was a witness. The station modem was immediately assigned to the provider where it was examined by a council of several local luminaries in the field of communications and solemnly plugged into that very single free port. Upon returning to work, the subscriber modem met my server’s COM port and then ... a miracle happened. Everything worked almost the first time, I didn’t even believe that everything turned out to be so simple.
The Internet at the plant “took off” - after a measly 10-15 to a stable 115k seemed like a real jerk of technical progress. Particularly pleased was the accounting department, which now did not need to announce the entire factory office as before with cries of “we want to be a customer-baaank! ..”. The new connection made a reality that it was practically impossible before - a whole movie could be downloaded over the weekend (by the way, the first downloaded movie was The Matrix, which hints), and the sites opened at almost the speed with which the server gave them. The “walkers” reached out to the plant with requests to download something for friendship and for swag, and the city IT establishment tried to ask for a visit and see how it all worked.
The initial impression about “Pilgrim” turned out to be sharply erroneous - the modem worked reliably like a rock, as long as I remember its operation - it never stopped. In addition, its steel armored housing ambiguously hinted that the Internet will work for us, even if the ceiling in the server room collapses. Over time, I dragged the distribution of the Internet from a domain controller under Windows to FreeBSD version 3. The “classic” ipfw & squid were raised, the shaper was delivered to users, forbidden sites were primitively spelled out. Yes, yes, already at that time I had to mercilessly punish the fans to shake the film during the working day or to watch pornographic pictures that the management did not like.
As time went on, requests grew. I didn’t want good Internet not only at work, but also at home, and there wasn’t any alternative providers in the city. In addition, my situation was complicated by the fact that my home landline phone was in a park with my neighbor, a babusya divine dandelion, whose main entertainment was in very frequent calls to its many children, grandchildren and girlfriends, and as always, at the most inopportune moment. Especially grandmother often liked to call out on duty at weekends, and sometimes conversations could really drag on continuously half a day.
Then it was impossible to put up with all this disgrace, besides the salaries were then small and the Internet payment was in fact a considerable part of it. By that time, one of the two existing client-bank lines had been completely freed, which made it possible for the IDC-5614 BXL / VR modem to service it to take more important work — work in my home instead of US Robotics, yet IDC was (honor and praise to him) a great all-terrain vehicle on domestic communication lines. The same modem, which previously served the factory office for Internet access, was gathering peacefully near the server in case anything happened to Pilgrim. The third modem in accounting and hung himself on the client-bank system.
The solution came as Mendeleev, in a dream ...
The idea appeared in the form of a diagram. Certainly not in the format of MS Visio 2013, but still not in the form of an electrical principle :)
The meaning of the work of this whole chain was as follows.
Two modems were connected to the server (in the old scheme, when everything fit on one server): Pilgrim XDSL, which provided the office with Internet access and analog IDC-5614 BLX / VR (let's call it “myself-ISP ") Configured (via an AT command) to automatically pick up the phone in case of an incoming call and establish a connection. One more modem IDC-5614 BLX / VR was stuck into the telephone line between these modems, it was connected directly to a computer in the accounting department and serviced the client-bank system. Since he worked on top of DSL, the accounting department at any time could get in touch with the bank without interrupting the permanent office connection to the Internet. A special domain account was created on the domain controller server, in the properties of which a specific internal IP address was specified in the Dial-Up setting and the Dial-Up connection itself was actually allowed.
On weekdays, the “self-ISP” modem was inactive, posing as a backup line to the Internet in the eyes of the authorities in the event of a “Pilgrim” failure, which was true in principle - to reconfigure it for this task was a matter of five minutes. But after work or on weekends the most interesting began.
I dialed from home to the line number of our client-bank office system (she had her own city phone number), the dialing signal passed through Pilgrim and the “bukh” modem to the self-to-ISP modem without difficulty, he shot the connection was established, as a result of which my home PC got access to the internal network of the enterprise and, at the same time, to high-quality Internet, since the routing and access control service together with Kerio WinRoute was configured to NAT my packets into the Internet connection channel, . to the network connection on the server, personified by the Pilgrim modem. The conditional traffic route is shown in the diagram by red arrows - it turned out like in that famous song “... I looked around to see if she looked back, to see if I looked around ...” - just the same hymn of recursion.
At the same time, I did not pay a dime for the connection to the Internet arranged in this way - per-minute billing of city calls to our analog city PBX appeared a decade later.
The only problem was the human factor of the grandmother of God dandelion. I repent, I had to act cruelly. No, nothing happened to Grandma.
The persuasion of granny that de is sometimes necessary and others to give to talk - had no action. If at the weekend she began to arrange her traditional incessant conversations from morning to evening, she had to be forced to cut her off by crossing the blocker, which fortunately was located in my apartment. I was seriously afraid that one day my grandmother would need the phone not only for a banal talker, but for, say, an ambulance call, so I didn’t arrange the trick with the lock on a weekday until midnight. In addition, I set up my home modem on a permanently on speaker, which made it possible to listen to the reason for the next Granny call - in the case of an emergency call, I would not wait for the break and immediately disconnect myself, freeing the line. The situation finally resolved itself in a month - the grandmother several times called telephone operators, who only threw up their hands, and then she managed to pry our telephone monopolist so much that she was finally given a separate line.
For two years I enjoyed quality free Internet without sudden breaks and with guaranteed speed, causing the envy of my acquaintances, until I decided to move to the capital, where by that time the beginnings of mass broadband Internet had arisen and numerous pioneers pulled their copper through sleeping areas.
As for the good old "Pilgrim" - the modem worked without a single complaint for several years, finally visiting as a backup and emergency channel until it received a new decent change in the form of optics and was not placed in a closet to the warehouse of old equipment, from which it was recently removed at my request, at my request, former colleagues didn’t take a memory photo for Habr.
Now, after so many years, when in my apartment there are two full-fledged symmetrical 100Mbit / s SLA channels to the world, all these “offshore” Internet connection schemes in my dreams seem to be a matter of bygone days, essentially an Internet childhood. But that was, that was, now it is history.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/189174/
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