[HN Gopher] Converting a Cisco 7609 into a beer tap (2021)
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Converting a Cisco 7609 into a beer tap (2021)
Author : pantalaimon
Score : 135 points
Date : 2024-05-24 09:40 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.jonasbengtson.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.jonasbengtson.se)
| lanthade wrote:
| This reminds me of my favorite IT gear conversion when someone
| turned a SGI challenge into a mini fridge. I have a fondness for
| all things SGI (Irix era) due to labs full of Indys during my
| college years.
|
| I was pretty surprised to find that the project documentation was
| uploaded to a modern website when I searched. I figured like many
| things of its era that it had been lost to web rot.
|
| https://www.instructables.com/Convert-a-Silicon-Graphics-Ser...
| ofrzeta wrote:
| SGI nostalgia here, as well. There's also the Indigo espresso
| machine:
|
| http://www.8bit-homecomputermuseum.at/computer/silicon_graph...
| Keyframe wrote:
| first thing that came to my mind! what a throwback!
| PaulHoule wrote:
| When I think of SGI I think of numerous stories of screw-ups:
| like the professor who bought one without enough RAM, plugged
| it into the Ethernet and power for three years, didn't use
| it, but it got hacked. Or the 1990s demo where Geoffrey Fox
| had two twin from eastern Europe try to run a program on a
| fashionable big SMO machine and it failed, and Fox said
| "Never buy a gigabyte of cheap RAM!"
| ofrzeta wrote:
| Security wasn't exactly priority #1 with SGI. In our lab we
| wouldn't bother to remember root passwords because it was
| so easy to download some of many root exploits for IRIX.
| walrus01 wrote:
| In the early to mid 2000s I saw photos of an SGI Crimson that
| somebody gutted and turned into a very powerful (at that
| time) x86 gaming PC.
| dfox wrote:
| IIRC even SGI themselves had something like Octane case
| converted into beer tap and used that very successfully as a
| way to get people onto their stand at trade fairs.
| imrejonk wrote:
| Reminded me of the Internet Beer Tap by Techinc, a hacker space
| in Amsterdam:
|
| > Once upon a time, a lovely piece of Purple networking hardware
| got pushed into the obscene job of having to function in tapping
| the internet for law-enforcement purposes. After liberating the
| quarter-million-dollar-networking-switch, we have taken it upon
| ourselves to offer it a worthy retirement plan that allows it to
| re-socialize itself. The Internet Beer Tap became a fact.
|
| https://wiki.techinc.nl/Internet_Beer_Tap
| mrweasel wrote:
| That would be one way to get me to go into the datacenter.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Why would you go through all of that, if you can get a better,
| complete solution from a different vendor?
|
| https://www.lightreading.com/routing-switching/iskratel-s-br...
| tveyben wrote:
| No blinkenligths...!
| jeffalyanak wrote:
| Why have hobbies when someone else can do it better?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Why read this site at all if this is your point of view? The
| phreaking title of the site is HACKER NEWS for pete's sake.
| Holy cow can some people absolutely miss the point.
| wazoox wrote:
| SGI did an "Espressigo" as a marketing ploy back in 1992:
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SGI_Espressigo#/...
| Foxboron wrote:
| Got served carbonated gammel dansk from this tap, and tortured by
| "Nar man festar festar man" on repeat for 6 days during Chaos
| Communication Camp.
|
| 10/10, no notes.
|
| Would do again.
| dcminter wrote:
| On a similar note, the Vax bar:
| http://toyvax.glendale.ca.us/~vance/vaxbar.html
|
| It pains me a little to see nice old pieces of equipment turned
| into something... lesser... but it's harmless fun and in the
| moment when they're surplus and valueless, well, we can't keep
| _all_ of them up and running.
| kloch wrote:
| Nobody who had to work with 6509's/7609's at an ISP is shedding
| a tear over this.
|
| Someone (Richard Steenbergen?) once made a joke that we should
| take the last 6509/7609 and launch it into orbit to celebrate.
|
| It's not that they weren't popular. At one point in the mid
| 2000's they appeared to make up about 1/3 of major internet
| routers (if you looked around a carrier hotel). This was due to
| their extremely low cost compared to actual high end routers.
| While they had serious limitations and were notoriously
| sensitive to "IOS roulette", somehow you could just make them
| work.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| The 7600 was an absolutely idiotic product. The 6500 was, for
| the time, fine as an enterprise Ethernet switch (much more
| capable obviously once the sup 2 with fabric services module
| and sup 720 with integrated crossbar came along,) but using
| it as a ISP router, especially where you were taking a full
| routing table? That was just stupid.
|
| For anyone reading this that doesn't have experience with
| these things, when the parent commenter talks about "just
| making them work," one failure mode among many in these
| devices is that packet forwarding is primarily done in
| hardware, more or less at line rate. But, if you enable an
| IOS feature that isn't supported in hardware, it gets
| processed in software. In more "ISP-focused" routers, it is
| common to just not support features that aren't implemented
| in hardware. Forwarding performance on these platforms goes
| from almost 500 million packets per second in hardware (in
| certain highly specific and very unlikely scenarios) to
| around 40 - 50 thousand packets per second -- absolute best-
| case -- in software. Another failure mode specifically
| applicable to the ISP scenario is the fixed hardware
| forwarding table size, which for many models was 192k IPv4
| prefixes. could you have a larger forwarding table size?
| Absolutely. In software.
| lanthade wrote:
| Taking the phrase "Will route IP for beer" seriously.
| slashink wrote:
| Fun to see this posted this on HN (I am the author!). Happy to
| answer any questions. I think the general question I didn't
| really touch on is "why" and really the only answer for that is
| "why not?"
| dfox wrote:
| > I never imagined fiber cable being used for something other
| than data
|
| Interesting side note is that Compaq ProLiant servers of roughly
| the same vintage as C7600 actually use optical fibers for system
| status LEDs. (And using fiber instead of rigid lightpipes is not
| that uncommon in HDD trays)
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(page generated 2024-05-25 23:01 UTC)