Dell - Internal Use - Confidential Still alive and well out here in 07860. :)
My memory is somewhat rusty as it's been a while, but at Tellurian I'm pretty positive we ran a DS3+ worth of lines from Sprint from 07860 so I'm not sure if "by far" is totally accurate. ;) We terminated on a PM4 here, mostly with bleeding edge fixed code that I don't think was even officially released by Lucent. It helps if you know the developers. We had access to the source code as well at one time for the Portmaster line. I remember an emergency one time where we basically provisioned an on demand T1 to connect POPs together through the Portmasters via ISDN. They were cool machines. I also used to run a Portmaster ORU at my house which was also rock solid. Great for gaming back then... I know once we ported numbers away from Sprint to Focal/Broadwing/Level 3, at our peak we had two DS3's of PRI's on an AS5800 as well. Those boxes bothered me as the modems frequently rotted over time and required regular maintenance to refresh them and make them happy again... otherwise your call completion rates started dipping. I'm surprised you had so few dialup accounts. When we shutdown all of our dialup (we sent most of them to NAC), we had far more than 30 active accounts based on all RADIUS logs. I don't know how in this day and age, but they were there and dialing in still up to the day I pulled the power on the AS5800, despite customers being warned. Ah, memories... now I'm thinking back when I ran a BBS on Fidonet... FOSSIL drivers, Frontdoor, echomail. :) Now those were the days! -Vinny -----Original Message----- From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-boun...@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Alex Rubenstein Sent: Thursday, March 5, 2015 10:10 AM To: Matthew Crocker; Nick Hilliard Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: RE: optical gear cooling requirements It is interesting where this conversation turned. But for history's sake... NAC started on PM2e with Microcom's, and then USR Sportster. I remember USR sending us PROM chips to change from 28.8 to 33.6. After that, PM3's. We were early PM3 users, working with Megazone on an almost continuous basis to work on bugs. We tried the PM4, that went nowhere. Then we tried Assured Access - it had promise but ultimately was no good. Ultimately, went to used AS5800's with ChDS3 cards, which ran from a long time ago until just a couple months ago when we finally (and literally) pulled the plug on dialup (I think we had about 30 active accounts from a peak of over 35,000). There was a time where NAC was by far the largest customer of the LEC portion of Sprint in NJ, with two DS3's of PRI's out of NWTNJ alone (look that up, it's in the woods in 07860). Sprint had to actually buy software upgrades for the DMS we were out of to accommodate a hunt-group that large (or, so we were told). This was after we had about 700 POTS lines to a house and they begged us to move to the CO. Ahh, the good old days. And it is amazing how well it all worked, in retrospect, and how much fun the business was. Then you see things like "Net Neutrality", and it makes me want to hide in the woods and shed a tear. > >> We used Livingston Portmaster 3 back in the day. Front to back > >> ventilation, ran cool as a cucumber, plug it in and it just worked. > >> Awesome gear until Lucent bought the company to kill the product in > >> favor of their Ascend TNT space heaters.
