Early Vid: All-In-One Dial-up ISP Box
Added 2025-01-30 02:37:06 +0000 UTCConsolidating my homelab dial-up setup from a Cisco 2911 and 2600 into a single Cisco 3725, complete with 8-port analog modem card! We get a blistering 14.4Kbps... but hey, that's all I ever got half the time back in the early 2000s anyway!
Video should go live on the channel Friday!
Comments
Little slow on the draw here; Youtube comments already got you `no ip domain-lookup` to stop typos from being interpreted as DNS lookups. Additionally, `log synchronous` under your line settings will stop the log output from clobbering your input. Basically it prints a carriage return and reprints what you were doing when it interrupts you. Never really figured out why that wouldn't be default... Also whenever you get stuck in something like a DNS lookup or a ping you want out of, you can also do control + terminal break sequence. I usually interact with it as control-shift-6 but YMMV. Cisco does have documentation, but godspeed: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/routers/10000-series-routers/12818-61.html#toc-hId--1355847008
Eric
2025-02-01 04:33:10 +0000 UTCCisco loves to use FPGA's on their cards instead of designing ASICs, *especially* when it means they can avoid buying specialized chips from other vendors. Sometimes they do it because they can get better performance but it feels like it's usually to avoid one cost in favor of another. In the case of the Token Ring module, the FPGA's are likely doing all the heavy lifting that the IBM chips are doing on the other devices.
John Bailey
2025-02-01 02:36:41 +0000 UTCYou're making it real hard not to want my own dial-up ISP. Maybe I should start by looking for an ATA.
Martin Paulsen
2025-01-30 14:52:23 +0000 UTCThe Xilinx Spartan is a FPGA (Field Programmable Grid Array). Nothing specifically to do with token ring, just a black box of circuits that can be repeatedly programmed in hardware languages like VHDL to perform digital logic with better performance than code on a general purpose CPU. Someone smarter than me can probably elaborate on what it might be doing on that card.
Matthew Recchia
2025-01-30 10:50:31 +0000 UTCahh that makes perfect sense
clabretro
2025-01-30 06:35:28 +0000 UTCThe "fake" module slot is there because there were a very few double-wide modules for voice stuff. Similar to how there were some double-wide WIC and HWIC cards.
John Bailey
2025-01-30 03:28:56 +0000 UTCLooking forward to it ✌️
Retro Ned
2025-01-30 02:41:54 +0000 UTC
