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.
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?"
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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> 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