"no ip domain lookup" is your absolute best friend along with "logging synchronous" both are instant entries any time you configure a machine... Your level of frustration in iOS will literally half instantly 😂
(no ip domain lookup will stop unknown commands from trying to search for a DNS hostname, which is what it does by default, and logging synchronous will make it not interrupt your typing for console messages) I thought I should clarify instead of spout mysterious commands 😂
The big RJ-21 connectors off your card and feeding your jack panel are also called Centronics or Amphenol 50-pin connectors, which can help when looking for compatible gear. Keep in mind that these cables and connectors can be custom-built for some applications, sometimes having the pin count start at different ends of the connectors and would use the telephone color code. The slashes on your breakout block counts indicate it could have been used with equipment handling up to 50 pairs, using two RJ21 cables. (1-25 and 26-50) As a Central Office Network Technician, I have to say that I'm really enjoying your channel's content! Seeing gear that I've used in the past (or in some cases have yet to retire) be appreciated for the amazing things they have been doing for decades is awesome. Major kudos to you sir!
I see a clabretro video, I click on it, I'm a simple man that wants dial up stuff, T1, token ring and vintage networking and computing. I've set up an ATA and sent a fax from a laptop with a modem to a freepbx fax server. getting closer to the dialup dream! thanks for the video, as usual, excellent quality and topics
32:57 you can disable domain lookup by doing the command, "no ip domain-lookup" when in config mode. To cancel domain lookup you have to send a break character, how that character is sent depends on your terminal software. This shortcut works on other commands too, like a ping which is taking too long or a traceroute. This was one of the first things I learned from my teacher when I was studying for my CCNA
"no ip domain-lookup" is a very common configuration. However a more targeted solution is to only apply fixes to the consoles, not to the global DNS settings, ex: line con 0 transport preferred none vty 0 15 transport preferred none
Try typing "logging synchronous" to keep the console output debug messages from interrupting your commands as you are typing. You can't call yourself a network engineer unless you've racked Cisco bricks to a rack yourself, one handed, in an awkward position, while not accidentally unplugging any other cables to other equipment. Thanks for the video and cat tax.
@@clabretroI remember mentioning this you can make it permanent by going into line con 0 then logging syn and that will make the behavior the default also not sure if this is an IOS 12 thing but the do prefix will execute a priv exec command in conf t mode
Dude, I'm so happy I get to live vicariously through your videos. That IBM on the bench was the first home PC my dad bought in 1995. That specific model tower, P133, 16MB, 2gb deathstar, ATI RageII, 28.8 modem, and win95. Came bundled with a baller XGA 14" monitor, lexmark printer, decent speakers, and more than enough software to fill the hard drive. Good times. Thanks for doing this so I don't have to/store it. I don't have the space. Love the videos, you're my same blend of homelabbing and retro nonsince.
clabretro, i love your videos. i'm 17 and i'm studying some networking and computer related stuff in france and when i see that you uploaded it always brings up joy! because i've learn how to configure switch and routers and i've already did it, it's much easier to understand the commands you type and the stuff you do.
Thanks for doing this type of videos on your channel. I am a network engineer with 17 years experience with Cisco and Juniper. I started working in networking in 2008 and these technologies and Cisco models were being phased out at that time so I never got to work on them daily. It is fun to watch you work on the hardware and the software.
There's also an EVM-HD 8FXS/DID card that has 8x FXS ports on the RJ21. You can expand that as well, up to 24x. There are some you-know-where going pretty cheap. Some already have at least one expansion card module installed, and the modules themselves are available for a song too. Only caveat is (in typical Cisco fashion) not all NM slots will take an EVM. I use a 2851. Just read up before you commit. (P.S.: Try "show inventory" instead of "show diag") PPS: You say "this isn't the way any professional would do it" -- but that's actually _exactly_ what those cards are for. You're not using overkill hardware to make an ATA. You're building a PBX. The ISRs are meant to do exactly that -- voice and data routing. That's what "Integrated Services" (the IS in ISR) means. :-) Using an ATA is a band-aid when it's uneconomical to add an analog port somewhere. What no professional would do, is use a bunch of silly cheap ATAs to provide business-critical voice lines... not when they could use centrally-managed, industrial strength FXS interfaces to do it instead. So, you, my friend, are moving up in the world. 👍
That slot on the top of your 3700 that doesn't have a backplane port -- that's for a "double-wide" NM. You could get a switch module that had like 16 FE interfaces. They weren't routed interfaces, mind, just a managed switch inside your router. So that's why that slot is there. LOTS of those ISR routers would fake you out like that. ;-) If you haven't run into them yet, be on the lookout for PVDM modules too. They look like RAM/flash SIMMs, but they have DSP chips on them instead. They have different capacities -- e.g., 16, 32, 48 channels, depending on the number of DSP chips on them. These do all the grunt work for handling voice codecs, and are usually necessary to set up voice channels at all. Your low-complexity codecs (incl. u-law) may take 1 DSP channel per call, while high-complexity codecs take more than 1 channel. There are charts that show you which codecs use what resources, and it also varies per generation due to the horsepower on tap with that gen's DSP (PVDM2 vs. PVDM3, which are used in 2800 and 2900 series, respectively, e.g.) I had a bunch of these in my routers already, but hadn't done much voice stuff, so I didn't actually know how many channels I needed -- if any -- or if it was just for VoIP sessions. Nope. As soon as I turned up two T1 cards, it ran out of channels and told me to come back when I had some PVDM2-48 modules. ;-) Luckily these things are falling out of couch cushions at any place that had an ISR.
@@clabretroheyo! I didn't know you have a GitHub! And you code in Golang too... Haha.... Assignments coding in Golang is kinda killing me 💀. Haha.... Followed!
Really cool video! I’ve used these routers when I was starting out in networking, and had no idea all of these different modules existed. Every time you post another dial-up video I really get the itch to do a setup of my own. I have a little 8-port analog PBX and a couple of mid-2000s Cisco routers just sitting in storage, waiting…
This video comes at the perfect moment when I was about to start figuring this out on my 2600. Also I laughed when you said, “I’ll hang this off the back temporarily”. We both know that’s the production config.
I haven't played around with this sort of equipment but I can't explain exactly how it is so much fun playing around with tech that no normal person could afford to just play with when it was current.
Made thousands of the 25 pair and 30 pair AMP connectors back in the day. Look up the comb/crimp tool for those things. Common pair colors Blue, Orange, Green, Brown and Slate. Bundle colors White, Red, Black and Yellow. 25 pair cable had Violet for the 5th bundle. 30 pair had 2 white and 2 red bundles no Violet.
I never used dial up and I've never configured anything more complicated than a consumer wireless router and switch. But I absolutely adore this content and I'm not sure why. I think the "It has more cables plugged in, so it's better" is what gets me.
Last year I had to do some maintenance un-chocolating a pair of calipers and I ended up washing all of the lubricant off too. It was really hard to apply an appropriately small amount of machine oil so I bought a pack of blunt syringes, and now this is basically the only way I lube small parts, it's so convenient and controlled, much less cleanup, easy to keep lube where you want it.
12:54 While I'm not that up to date on the 3700-series thats likely just for modules that are double the width of yours, there is likely modules with stuff like 48x Ethernet ports that are that wide. So while you can't put two of the ones you have side by side in there it allows space for those modules. And then that screw you had to take out screws into that module instead.
Oh man, outside of all the other great stuff in this video that xjack connector on the modem card unlocked some memories. My dad had one of those in his work laptop of the time and I always thought it was so nifty!
32:55 For the routers that support it a 'no ip domain lookup' in configuration mode should stop random text from being interpreted as a request to connect to a host
@@clabretro I'll warn that adding that config entry does have other side effects, like if you ever need to connect to another device via hostname. So be aware, but I still configure that in my own homelab.
i just blew up a power supply (my own fault) and popped onto my computer to sulk, this definitely cheers me up. something i will say tho, is now you have me fiending for some token ring.
(0:58) That "NEC Cisco 3700 series" thing reminded me of when NEC had PowerMate models in the early 2010s that were exclusively available in Japan and appeared to have been based on Lenovo ThinkCentre models of the time, albeit in white with blue accents instead of black with magenta accents. I only knew about those because some of them ended up on the used market in Singapore. I've a feeling a lot of those PCs were purchased by companies that had more trust in the NEC brand than they did in the Lenovo brand, or they had contracts with some IT company that provided NEC products.
What you've got there is an Allen Tel Bridging adapter, which apparently, you can still buy new today. Graybar has them listed in their catalog lol! Essentially you can daisy chain a pair of these blocks together using the in/out ports, and on block 1 port 1 would be bridged to block 2 port 26. This was done for a number of reasons such as call monitoring & recording, having multiple phones with the same station/DID, conference bridging, test equipment etc. While I've never actually used those blocks, there are still some screwed to the wall behind the analog gateways in my office datacenter. Ironically those blocks do something that in more "modern" times can be done inside the analog gateway itself. From my experience on the larger analog PBXs, you'd have the RJ21 coming out of the gateways line card and terminating on a set of 110 blocks. From there, you can patch a specific port of the analog gateway which supplies dial tone for the station to some other location in the building using a single pair of wires going to another 110 block. I really cut my teeth on telephony in my professional career and its almost a shame that while you're in process of spinning up your own analog PBX, I'm doing everything humanly imaginable to remove all the some 500 active analog stations I have in the campus today.
I know I desperately would like to have some sort of PBX at my house well at the same time where I now work I just went through all the phone lines and redid them properly all to serve the massive amounts of "1" phone line for the elevator telephone call box. but at least I know every pair now is one for one through the whole system. And you know the Elevator phone actually works in the wire going in the panel didn't have that necked bear spot on the pear causing it to not work right. And everything is labeled from the phone company box in Elevator phone did not disconnect.
@@imark7777777 I went pretty heavy into playing with Asterick a few years ago. Got a VM spun up on my proxmox node, set up a bunch of Cisco 7945s configured as IP phones, even had a SIP provider configured with XMPP to connect with my Google Voice account! That was awesome! If you called my mobile phone, it would also ring into one particular station of my asterick PBX and I could answer the call on an IP desk phone! After google did what google does best, and killed off the XMPP connection, I kinda lost interest in the local PBX and have since decommissioned it. The last of my telephony stuff that exists is a Cisco SPA525G2 sitting on my desk configured for "Hamshack Hotline" that I use to dial into some ham radio repeaters when inclimate weather is afoot. Though, I did buy a Grandstream ATA the other day to add a VOIP dial down to my Home Assistant voice assistant for use with my 1960s Western Electric 554 rotary telephone, it turns out the ATA is locked down to vonage and cannot easily be unlocked allowing console access to set the dial pattern required to make that work. Eventually I'll get around to buying one of the Cisco ATAs that isn't locked and get that all set up. I'm still a cable monkey at heart despite the majority of my career is now focused on network engineering instead of telephony. One of my coworkers the other day made fun of me when he saw me carrying around my old analog tempo buttset. Kids these days lol.
Very cool! I have a Cisco 3925 here. I just need some FXS cards and modem cards. Right now it has a couple E&M cards. I might keep the E&M cards in there and add an FXS and modem card in there since there's 4 slots. I also came across something very interesting. What's weird about it is theres zero mention of it online.... They're Digi-Tech Microlink M340 Data/Voice multiplexers for radio repeaters. From what I heard you can even do ethernet (albeit very slow) over radio with them. I'm diving into the manual to see its full capabilities. Units are made in Christchurch New Zealand.
Back when I did an A+ cert in high school in the mid 2000s Token Ring was something I had to learn about but never had seen nor would I ever see it. Been looking forward to your vid on it.
I love this kinda content, i dont know a thing about it
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I can't believe how incredibly convenient and coincidental it was to find that IOS image on your desktop 😇 I reckon it boots slower because the image would take twice as long to decompress and copy to RAM, given that it is almost twice as big 😉
With that rj21 port, I bet that thing could hook up to an Ascent MAX unit, that was an ISP in a box. That would be a trip. I use to manage thousands of those. What memories ....
Older modems use AC to generate the negative voltage for RS232. Learned this the hard way some days ago. Thought about modifying and put a switching converter into, but at the end I found the correct brick.
You can swap those rack ears to what you would think would be the back of the router. This would give you easier access to all the ports when its in the rack.
25:50 it's not the flash card's fault either.. TFTP is a goddamn slow protocol since it does block checksumming every 1kb and uses a highly unreliable UDP stream for transfer. I don't think I've ever seen any machine that would do that any faster. Always a lot of fun setting up devices like their wifi access points with 50MB+ images that include the web interface files.
@@AgentOffice TFTP is sort of a predecessor to FTP. It doesn't have authentication or users, it doesn't have any commands beyond get and put, it doesn't understand directories. This makes it incredibly easy to implement and requires only very little code space. This made it popular e.g. as a software update mechanism for embedded systems like switches and routers, where the whole boot code needs to fit into very little ROM. It also uses a UDP packet stream which is a lot less complex than TCP, and it supports basic checksums per block to ensure correct transmission.
@@clabretroThat's what I get for commenting before finishing. You explained the daisy chain just now 😅 I will say though that the Velcro is meant to retain the connector.
For those that don’t know: those breakout panels need two of these to utilize all 100 pairs. Red is primary (1-25), and blue (26-50) secondary. Each trunk cable (rj21) contains exactly 25 pairs, and you typically wouldn’t combine the primary and secondary trunk cables on one panel. I don’t recall the breakout panels having more than a single pair per port either.
Curiosity got me looking to see how much these nm-hda cards are going for, for some of the old cisco stuff I have lying around. Found out the sub-boards you're looking for are em-hda parts and there's a few on ebay. So that should hopefully get you set if you want more of the pairs used
I'm not sure if it's era appropriate (probably?) but I'd use Cat5 with RJ11 terminations to do breakout from the FXS ports and into the modem ports. You could get 4 phone lines over a single cable, cleaning it up quite a bit and pretty much trunking 4 lines back to the modem via one cable that you just run along the big cable, splitting them out back at the router. Then you could also use RJ11 jacks with cat5 (and RJ45 if you wanted to be fancy) to push a bunch of phone lines to the other room from the retro rack.
One trick for rack ears is to flip the rackmount brackets so they are closer to the center of mass. Downsite, the router pokes out the front a bit. Ideally you'd find or make the rear mount brackets that fit your depth of rack. Its only folded steel with four holes, not that complex.
I do remember the mid to late 1990s - All the IBM people in our company were all "token ring is better becuase it dosen't have any packet loss, that's why it's used in banks!" and I was like... ??? huh? That... doesn't make a lick of sense but it sure sounds like something an IBM salesperson would say. 😸 - but eventually, even the AS/400 was "ethernetted" - there were also adapters for the old twinax wires, so you could plug in really old terminals to RJ45 cabling.
If I remember correctly, I was told, when I was working at the network reasearch lab of NEC, they somewhat partnered with CISCO in the early 90's to have a base on researching SDN (Software Defined Networking) and MultiPath TCP. Maybe this fact is related to this 3700 series. just my 50cts.
17:39 Its an FPGA, a bunch of logic gates, its programmable hardware basically, the firmware will configure it to do some function it needs, its faster than using a CPU, and it also allow you to basically switch signals and send them where you need in a way that can be changed via software by configuration.
If you stay with the four ports on the RJ21, it would make more sense to get a solderable or screwable RJ21 plug and add RJ11 and RJ45 cables to it. IF you want to have it really convenient, you can bring all eight modem ports and the four lines from the RJ21 to a patch panel to the front, you you can use breakout cables there :) I messed with RJ21 for a while and I still have some plugs and panel mount sockets somewhere in a box. But as I only work with four lines at all (just the limit of my ATA), I ended up with two RJ11 (line 1 and 2) and a RJ45 (all four lines) on my workbench to save up space. By the way, on most hardware port 25/50 was unpopulated. They stayed with things devideable by 8 so 24/49 was the last one.
In Japan it was exceedingly common for NEC to be a hardware partner for non-Japanese companies. You can find a _ton_ of gear from companies that are popular in the west in Japan with an NEC logo on it alongside the western companies branding. This doesn't surprise me at all.
The parallel port on the modem was to provide an alternative, non-standard but faster, connection to the PC. The modem could compress the data it was sending over the wire (that's what MNP is - MNP 1 to 4 just did error correction, MNP 5 and up did error correction plus data compression) so if you've got a very easily compressible file you could theoretically need to push data to the modem faster than the max 115.2Kbps the PC's serial port supported. So you'd use the parallel port with a special driver to make it look like a serial port to the PC OS. In reality finding data that easily compressible was very rare so it was a bit of a gimmick.
I find rack studs excellent for a one-person rankings, the studs allows you to place your heavy stuff rack mount directly on the suds so you can easily hold it with one hand, and as you screw a nut with your hands you dont have to look for that dam screwdriver that you realize is out of reach and you need to repeat the whole dam process- its awesome and your fingers will also thank you..
You can also add for line con0 logging synchronous so it when the logging shows up it will not overwrite what you have. Your input will still be continuous.
This video came up right after I put a bid on eBay for a 48 port Dell gigabit network switch. It’ll be my first big switch and first foray into management over serial terminals!
I never used dial up, my first internet was PPPoE. But damn you're making me want to set up either a small dial up or PPPoE "ISP" for my Sun Ultra 5 and ThinkCenter Pentium 4 (which is a bit taller than yours) machines. It's not much but it's my little retro cave.
25:43 the speed of the card is part of it, the other part is that tftp isn't an efficient protocol - it's one of those things that I suspect someone threw together to transfer data between devices where other protocols weren't available and then it got incorporated in a bunch of places before anyone could improve upon it.
32:55 to exit out of the dns lookup, you can do Ctrl+Shift+6 (idk why this is it, but thanks cisco!) And if you want it to disable it completely you should be able to do "no ip domain lookup"
Is there really no way for the call traffic from the FXS card to interface with the modem though the backplane? Seems like that would be much cleaner, though I guess this would never really be expected to be used like that.
I also have a feeling, if I am not crazy, that there was a (upwards of) 48 port switch module that could slide into that larger upper slot. There would also be a PoE power supply module that would be installed internally to supply 48V to that switch module. Or I'm confusing this with something that was available for the 3800 series.
Thanks for another great video! Enjoying the nostalgia and content immensely. If you're ever interested in exploring T1/PRI stuff, I have oodles of central office side and customer prem gear. Would be happy to donate. Much more fun than running the T1 cards back-to-back. Not to mention it looks cool in the rack 😊
Hey, I have an old AT&T workstation if you want it. Might be a 386. Think the computer was used by a local ISP for their networking back in the day. I live in Colorado.
If that controller card in the 3745 is removable, in true Cisco fashion I'm betting the chassis base SKU that article used for comparison didn't include the controller card, which is why it's seemingly cheaper. Tough to track down the old datasheets and ordering information now though (at least before I got bored lol).
I’m building something similar to this right now with a 2951 and a Nortel BCM50 (just because I want to support some Nortel phones too). However it’ll live in a rolling SKB 6U flight case to take to VCFs and other meetups!
It's been well over a decade since I've interacted with a genuine Cisco CLI, but aside from the suggestions others have also offered, I seem to have Ctrl-R burned into my muscle memory as something that'll "redraw" the current input line for you in case it gets messed up by asynchronous logging output.
"no ip domain lookup" is your absolute best friend along with "logging synchronous" both are instant entries any time you configure a machine... Your level of frustration in iOS will literally half instantly 😂
(no ip domain lookup will stop unknown commands from trying to search for a DNS hostname, which is what it does by default, and logging synchronous will make it not interrupt your typing for console messages) I thought I should clarify instead of spout mysterious commands 😂
I wish I was told this decades ago.
Every Cisco class I took in past years is coming back to me. What memories I made.
You could also do "transport preferred none" under line vty / line con if you have DNS dependencies.
The big RJ-21 connectors off your card and feeding your jack panel are also called Centronics or Amphenol 50-pin connectors, which can help when looking for compatible gear. Keep in mind that these cables and connectors can be custom-built for some applications, sometimes having the pin count start at different ends of the connectors and would use the telephone color code. The slashes on your breakout block counts indicate it could have been used with equipment handling up to 50 pairs, using two RJ21 cables. (1-25 and 26-50) As a Central Office Network Technician, I have to say that I'm really enjoying your channel's content! Seeing gear that I've used in the past (or in some cases have yet to retire) be appreciated for the amazing things they have been doing for decades is awesome. Major kudos to you sir!
I see a clabretro video, I click on it, I'm a simple man that wants dial up stuff, T1, token ring and vintage networking and computing. I've set up an ATA and sent a fax from a laptop with a modem to a freepbx fax server. getting closer to the dialup dream! thanks for the video, as usual, excellent quality and topics
nice! and thanks!
Can say the same! Addicted to Clab…
32:57 you can disable domain lookup by doing the command, "no ip domain-lookup" when in config mode. To cancel domain lookup you have to send a break character, how that character is sent depends on your terminal software. This shortcut works on other commands too, like a ping which is taking too long or a traceroute. This was one of the first things I learned from my teacher when I was studying for my CCNA
"no ip domain-lookup" is a very common configuration.
However a more targeted solution is to only apply fixes to the consoles, not to the global DNS settings, ex:
line con 0
transport preferred none
vty 0 15
transport preferred none
Try typing "logging synchronous" to keep the console output debug messages from interrupting your commands as you are typing. You can't call yourself a network engineer unless you've racked Cisco bricks to a rack yourself, one handed, in an awkward position, while not accidentally unplugging any other cables to other equipment. Thanks for the video and cat tax.
ahhh logging synchronous would've been a good one to cover as well!
@@clabretroI remember mentioning this you can make it permanent by going into line con 0 then logging syn and that will make the behavior the default also not sure if this is an IOS 12 thing but the do prefix will execute a priv exec command in conf t mode
It's utterly baffling why logg syn isn't default. Like that choice had to have been made by someone who hates people.
@@ax14pz107I agree it’s so common every setup I do I enable it also most of my scripts have that baked in for setting up new routers.
Huh? Not every engineer works on computer network hardware. These days no one is using Cisco anyway so I guess by your logic no one's an engineer.
Dude, I'm so happy I get to live vicariously through your videos. That IBM on the bench was the first home PC my dad bought in 1995. That specific model tower, P133, 16MB, 2gb deathstar, ATI RageII, 28.8 modem, and win95. Came bundled with a baller XGA 14" monitor, lexmark printer, decent speakers, and more than enough software to fill the hard drive. Good times. Thanks for doing this so I don't have to/store it. I don't have the space. Love the videos, you're my same blend of homelabbing and retro nonsince.
8:45 Those 25 phone jacks have 4 pins each, which means 2 phone lines per jack. You could plug up to 50 phones into that thing.
they just used 4-pin jacks, doesn't mean the 2nd line on each is wired to anything at all
48 minutes? was almost getting worried waiting for the next video, seems worth the wait! love from finland!
haha thanks!
Worth all 48 minutes 👍
clabretro, i love your videos. i'm 17 and i'm studying some networking and computer related stuff in france and when i see that you uploaded it always brings up joy! because i've learn how to configure switch and routers and i've already did it, it's much easier to understand the commands you type and the stuff you do.
Xilinx, sounds like Zai-links. ...man SO pumped for the token ring content. Long time in the making but gonna be worth.
Noctua YOU NEED TO SPONSOR THIS CHANNEL!!
Thanks for doing this type of videos on your channel. I am a network engineer with 17 years experience with Cisco and Juniper. I started working in networking in 2008 and these technologies and Cisco models were being phased out at that time so I never got to work on them daily. It is fun to watch you work on the hardware and the software.
glad to hear you enjoy them!
I love old networking, so much nice to watch and really brings me back to my youth!
A youtube video could not be more important right now. Thankyou for posting.
Excellent video. I was eagerly waiting for you to post something. Have a great weekend. You made my Friday night
glad to hear that!
There's also an EVM-HD 8FXS/DID card that has 8x FXS ports on the RJ21. You can expand that as well, up to 24x. There are some you-know-where going pretty cheap. Some already have at least one expansion card module installed, and the modules themselves are available for a song too.
Only caveat is (in typical Cisco fashion) not all NM slots will take an EVM. I use a 2851. Just read up before you commit.
(P.S.: Try "show inventory" instead of "show diag")
PPS: You say "this isn't the way any professional would do it" -- but that's actually _exactly_ what those cards are for. You're not using overkill hardware to make an ATA. You're building a PBX. The ISRs are meant to do exactly that -- voice and data routing. That's what "Integrated Services" (the IS in ISR) means. :-) Using an ATA is a band-aid when it's uneconomical to add an analog port somewhere. What no professional would do, is use a bunch of silly cheap ATAs to provide business-critical voice lines... not when they could use centrally-managed, industrial strength FXS interfaces to do it instead. So, you, my friend, are moving up in the world. 👍
That slot on the top of your 3700 that doesn't have a backplane port -- that's for a "double-wide" NM. You could get a switch module that had like 16 FE interfaces. They weren't routed interfaces, mind, just a managed switch inside your router. So that's why that slot is there. LOTS of those ISR routers would fake you out like that. ;-)
If you haven't run into them yet, be on the lookout for PVDM modules too. They look like RAM/flash SIMMs, but they have DSP chips on them instead. They have different capacities -- e.g., 16, 32, 48 channels, depending on the number of DSP chips on them. These do all the grunt work for handling voice codecs, and are usually necessary to set up voice channels at all. Your low-complexity codecs (incl. u-law) may take 1 DSP channel per call, while high-complexity codecs take more than 1 channel. There are charts that show you which codecs use what resources, and it also varies per generation due to the horsepower on tap with that gen's DSP (PVDM2 vs. PVDM3, which are used in 2800 and 2900 series, respectively, e.g.)
I had a bunch of these in my routers already, but hadn't done much voice stuff, so I didn't actually know how many channels I needed -- if any -- or if it was just for VoIP sessions. Nope. As soon as I turned up two T1 cards, it ran out of channels and told me to come back when I had some PVDM2-48 modules. ;-) Luckily these things are falling out of couch cushions at any place that had an ISR.
That Xilinx IC on the TR module -- pronounced "Zy Links" -- is an FPGA. You'll see some variant of that on just about every WIC and NM you have.
Not sure the 3700 can drive an EVM. 2800/3800 can, and so can the 2900/3900 in an SM adapter.
Nice! More telephony! I love it! Nice job dude. Great video again!
thanks!
@@clabretroheyo! I didn't know you have a GitHub! And you code in Golang too... Haha.... Assignments coding in Golang is kinda killing me 💀. Haha.... Followed!
Really cool video! I’ve used these routers when I was starting out in networking, and had no idea all of these different modules existed. Every time you post another dial-up video I really get the itch to do a setup of my own. I have a little 8-port analog PBX and a couple of mid-2000s Cisco routers just sitting in storage, waiting…
This video comes at the perfect moment when I was about to start figuring this out on my 2600.
Also I laughed when you said, “I’ll hang this off the back temporarily”. We both know that’s the production config.
This is going very well that is much more technical.
I haven't played around with this sort of equipment but I can't explain exactly how it is so much fun playing around with tech that no normal person could afford to just play with when it was current.
Made thousands of the 25 pair and 30 pair AMP connectors back in the day. Look up the comb/crimp tool for those things. Common pair colors Blue, Orange, Green, Brown and Slate. Bundle colors White, Red, Black and Yellow. 25 pair cable had Violet for the 5th bundle. 30 pair had 2 white and 2 red bundles no Violet.
Your hard work in putting all this together and your willingness to share with us is absolutely priceless. Thank you for everything you do Mr Retro❤
Man that IBM aptiva was a blast from the past. I remember we had that when I was a kid. The sliding front panel was great to play with
I never used dial up and I've never configured anything more complicated than a consumer wireless router and switch. But I absolutely adore this content and I'm not sure why. I think the "It has more cables plugged in, so it's better" is what gets me.
You make awesome videos, the longer the better.
Thanks for the reminder, we need to try getting one of those Microcom modems hooked up to a parallel port!
ALWAYS the best content for a Friday night.
Last year I had to do some maintenance un-chocolating a pair of calipers and I ended up washing all of the lubricant off too. It was really hard to apply an appropriately small amount of machine oil so I bought a pack of blunt syringes, and now this is basically the only way I lube small parts, it's so convenient and controlled, much less cleanup, easy to keep lube where you want it.
12:54 While I'm not that up to date on the 3700-series thats likely just for modules that are double the width of yours, there is likely modules with stuff like 48x Ethernet ports that are that wide. So while you can't put two of the ones you have side by side in there it allows space for those modules. And then that screw you had to take out screws into that module instead.
Always a good day when you upload!
good stuff man, you're on a roll lately
thank you!
Oh man, outside of all the other great stuff in this video that xjack connector on the modem card unlocked some memories. My dad had one of those in his work laptop of the time and I always thought it was so nifty!
For the 25 port phone breakout the two input maybe be for a line1 and a line2
32:55 For the routers that support it a 'no ip domain lookup' in configuration mode should stop random text from being interpreted as a request to connect to a host
perfect!
@@clabretro I'll warn that adding that config entry does have other side effects, like if you ever need to connect to another device via hostname. So be aware, but I still configure that in my own homelab.
@@KronK0321 Yes, the solution for this (without impacting other DNS settings) is to configure the con/vty lines with "transport preferred none"
i just blew up a power supply (my own fault) and popped onto my computer to sulk, this definitely cheers me up. something i will say tho, is now you have me fiending for some token ring.
Love the phone gear! Next step for your telco should be to connect some old long lines towers and place a long distance call.
Great video. That was my firs job in 2001 at ISP. Greetins from Serbia.
Awesome journey! Nice work!
(0:58) That "NEC Cisco 3700 series" thing reminded me of when NEC had PowerMate models in the early 2010s that were exclusively available in Japan and appeared to have been based on Lenovo ThinkCentre models of the time, albeit in white with blue accents instead of black with magenta accents. I only knew about those because some of them ended up on the used market in Singapore. I've a feeling a lot of those PCs were purchased by companies that had more trust in the NEC brand than they did in the Lenovo brand, or they had contracts with some IT company that provided NEC products.
never clicked on a video so fast! I love your content!
What you've got there is an Allen Tel Bridging adapter, which apparently, you can still buy new today. Graybar has them listed in their catalog lol! Essentially you can daisy chain a pair of these blocks together using the in/out ports, and on block 1 port 1 would be bridged to block 2 port 26. This was done for a number of reasons such as call monitoring & recording, having multiple phones with the same station/DID, conference bridging, test equipment etc. While I've never actually used those blocks, there are still some screwed to the wall behind the analog gateways in my office datacenter. Ironically those blocks do something that in more "modern" times can be done inside the analog gateway itself. From my experience on the larger analog PBXs, you'd have the RJ21 coming out of the gateways line card and terminating on a set of 110 blocks. From there, you can patch a specific port of the analog gateway which supplies dial tone for the station to some other location in the building using a single pair of wires going to another 110 block.
I really cut my teeth on telephony in my professional career and its almost a shame that while you're in process of spinning up your own analog PBX, I'm doing everything humanly imaginable to remove all the some 500 active analog stations I have in the campus today.
I know I desperately would like to have some sort of PBX at my house well at the same time where I now work I just went through all the phone lines and redid them properly all to serve the massive amounts of "1" phone line for the elevator telephone call box. but at least I know every pair now is one for one through the whole system. And you know the Elevator phone actually works in the wire going in the panel didn't have that necked bear spot on the pear causing it to not work right. And everything is labeled from the phone company box in Elevator phone did not disconnect.
@@imark7777777 I went pretty heavy into playing with Asterick a few years ago. Got a VM spun up on my proxmox node, set up a bunch of Cisco 7945s configured as IP phones, even had a SIP provider configured with XMPP to connect with my Google Voice account! That was awesome! If you called my mobile phone, it would also ring into one particular station of my asterick PBX and I could answer the call on an IP desk phone! After google did what google does best, and killed off the XMPP connection, I kinda lost interest in the local PBX and have since decommissioned it. The last of my telephony stuff that exists is a Cisco SPA525G2 sitting on my desk configured for "Hamshack Hotline" that I use to dial into some ham radio repeaters when inclimate weather is afoot.
Though, I did buy a Grandstream ATA the other day to add a VOIP dial down to my Home Assistant voice assistant for use with my 1960s Western Electric 554 rotary telephone, it turns out the ATA is locked down to vonage and cannot easily be unlocked allowing console access to set the dial pattern required to make that work. Eventually I'll get around to buying one of the Cisco ATAs that isn't locked and get that all set up. I'm still a cable monkey at heart despite the majority of my career is now focused on network engineering instead of telephony. One of my coworkers the other day made fun of me when he saw me carrying around my old analog tempo buttset. Kids these days lol.
ISP, when are you going to do artillery only again?
one thing to look at when comparing Cisco models is how powerful the NPE is.
Real excited for Token Ring, I've never had a decent understanding of how it worked or how it was shaped
I don't know why my brain doesn't want to accept "dial up" and "2000s" when dial up hasn't even properly gone away yet.
Very cool! I have a Cisco 3925 here. I just need some FXS cards and modem cards. Right now it has a couple E&M cards. I might keep the E&M cards in there and add an FXS and modem card in there since there's 4 slots. I also came across something very interesting. What's weird about it is theres zero mention of it online.... They're Digi-Tech Microlink M340 Data/Voice multiplexers for radio repeaters. From what I heard you can even do ethernet (albeit very slow) over radio with them. I'm diving into the manual to see its full capabilities. Units are made in Christchurch New Zealand.
A serial port and a clabretro video on the same day!
Those phone panels come in rackmount patch panels with the connector on the backside. My avaya system at my last job had them. Pretty neat.
Back when I did an A+ cert in high school in the mid 2000s Token Ring was something I had to learn about but never had seen nor would I ever see it. Been looking forward to your vid on it.
I had one of those Sportster modems!!! Was my first modem :) Wish I had kept it!
Your absolutely brilliant :) love your videos :)
I love this kinda content, i dont know a thing about it
I can't believe how incredibly convenient and coincidental it was to find that IOS image on your desktop 😇
I reckon it boots slower because the image would take twice as long to decompress and copy to RAM, given that it is almost twice as big 😉
With that rj21 port, I bet that thing could hook up to an Ascent MAX unit, that was an ISP in a box. That would be a trip. I use to manage thousands of those. What memories ....
very enjoying to see this video,so cool😄
Older modems use AC to generate the negative voltage for RS232. Learned this the hard way some days ago. Thought about modifying and put a switching converter into, but at the end I found the correct brick.
You can swap those rack ears to what you would think would be the back of the router. This would give you easier access to all the ports when its in the rack.
Awesome video
25:50 it's not the flash card's fault either.. TFTP is a goddamn slow protocol since it does block checksumming every 1kb and uses a highly unreliable UDP stream for transfer. I don't think I've ever seen any machine that would do that any faster. Always a lot of fun setting up devices like their wifi access points with 50MB+ images that include the web interface files.
good point! didn't think about how slow tftp is
I don't even know what tftp is. I've used ftp, sftp, ftps, scp
@@AgentOffice TFTP is sort of a predecessor to FTP. It doesn't have authentication or users, it doesn't have any commands beyond get and put, it doesn't understand directories. This makes it incredibly easy to implement and requires only very little code space. This made it popular e.g. as a software update mechanism for embedded systems like switches and routers, where the whole boot code needs to fit into very little ROM. It also uses a UDP packet stream which is a lot less complex than TCP, and it supports basic checksums per block to ensure correct transmission.
@WooShell that's wild
@@WooShell oddly FTP predates TFTP.
Referencing the breakout, each port can run 2 lines (inner and outer pair).
ah that makes sense, this thing is weird though, there is only the inner pair on each jack
@@clabretroThat's what I get for commenting before finishing. You explained the daisy chain just now 😅
I will say though that the Velcro is meant to retain the connector.
token ring, yes! That was the first network I worked on 😊 with MS Dos
Keep up your good work and video
I watched the first part of this again only a week or so ago and I've been desperate for this part to release since!
ha perfect timing!
For those that don’t know:
those breakout panels need two of these to utilize all 100 pairs. Red is primary (1-25), and blue (26-50) secondary. Each trunk cable (rj21) contains exactly 25 pairs, and you typically wouldn’t combine the primary and secondary trunk cables on one panel. I don’t recall the breakout panels having more than a single pair per port either.
Curiosity got me looking to see how much these nm-hda cards are going for, for some of the old cisco stuff I have lying around. Found out the sub-boards you're looking for are em-hda parts and there's a few on ebay. So that should hopefully get you set if you want more of the pairs used
nice, I'll have another look!
I'm not sure if it's era appropriate (probably?) but I'd use Cat5 with RJ11 terminations to do breakout from the FXS ports and into the modem ports. You could get 4 phone lines over a single cable, cleaning it up quite a bit and pretty much trunking 4 lines back to the modem via one cable that you just run along the big cable, splitting them out back at the router. Then you could also use RJ11 jacks with cat5 (and RJ45 if you wanted to be fancy) to push a bunch of phone lines to the other room from the retro rack.
One trick for rack ears is to flip the rackmount brackets so they are closer to the center of mass. Downsite, the router pokes out the front a bit. Ideally you'd find or make the rear mount brackets that fit your depth of rack. Its only folded steel with four holes, not that complex.
yeah they were flipped originally, i wanted it closer to the front haha
I do remember the mid to late 1990s - All the IBM people in our company were all "token ring is better becuase it dosen't have any packet loss, that's why it's used in banks!" and I was like... ??? huh? That... doesn't make a lick of sense but it sure sounds like something an IBM salesperson would say. 😸 - but eventually, even the AS/400 was "ethernetted" - there were also adapters for the old twinax wires, so you could plug in really old terminals to RJ45 cabling.
If I remember correctly, I was told, when I was working at the network reasearch lab of NEC, they somewhat partnered with CISCO in the early 90's to have a base on researching SDN (Software Defined Networking) and MultiPath TCP. Maybe this fact is related to this 3700 series. just my 50cts.
17:39 Its an FPGA, a bunch of logic gates, its programmable hardware basically, the firmware will configure it to do some function it needs, its faster than using a CPU, and it also allow you to basically switch signals and send them where you need in a way that can be changed via software by configuration.
If you stay with the four ports on the RJ21, it would make more sense to get a solderable or screwable RJ21 plug and add RJ11 and RJ45 cables to it. IF you want to have it really convenient, you can bring all eight modem ports and the four lines from the RJ21 to a patch panel to the front, you you can use breakout cables there :)
I messed with RJ21 for a while and I still have some plugs and panel mount sockets somewhere in a box. But as I only work with four lines at all (just the limit of my ATA), I ended up with two RJ11 (line 1 and 2) and a RJ45 (all four lines) on my workbench to save up space.
By the way, on most hardware port 25/50 was unpopulated. They stayed with things devideable by 8 so 24/49 was the last one.
In Japan it was exceedingly common for NEC to be a hardware partner for non-Japanese companies. You can find a _ton_ of gear from companies that are popular in the west in Japan with an NEC logo on it alongside the western companies branding. This doesn't surprise me at all.
The parallel port on the modem was to provide an alternative, non-standard but faster, connection to the PC. The modem could compress the data it was sending over the wire (that's what MNP is - MNP 1 to 4 just did error correction, MNP 5 and up did error correction plus data compression) so if you've got a very easily compressible file you could theoretically need to push data to the modem faster than the max 115.2Kbps the PC's serial port supported. So you'd use the parallel port with a special driver to make it look like a serial port to the PC OS. In reality finding data that easily compressible was very rare so it was a bit of a gimmick.
I find rack studs excellent for a one-person rankings, the studs allows you to place your heavy stuff rack mount directly on the suds so you can easily hold it with one hand, and as you screw a nut with your hands you dont have to look for that dam screwdriver that you realize is out of reach and you need to repeat the whole dam process- its awesome and your fingers will also thank you..
Ctrl+Shift+6 is the way to break out of the domain lookup :)
ahhhhh
@@clabretro You can also do 'no ip-domain lookup' under 'conf t' to disable that
I FREAKING LOVE YOU
The token ring card has everything on it. Xilinx, AMD, Intel. Must be insanely complex for such a small board
You can also add for line con0 logging synchronous so it when the logging shows up it will not overwrite what you have. Your input will still be continuous.
This video came up right after I put a bid on eBay for a 48 port Dell gigabit network switch. It’ll be my first big switch and first foray into management over serial terminals!
yessssss
I never used dial up, my first internet was PPPoE. But damn you're making me want to set up either a small dial up or PPPoE "ISP" for my Sun Ultra 5 and ThinkCenter Pentium 4 (which is a bit taller than yours) machines. It's not much but it's my little retro cave.
25:43 the speed of the card is part of it, the other part is that tftp isn't an efficient protocol - it's one of those things that I suspect someone threw together to transfer data between devices where other protocols weren't available and then it got incorporated in a bunch of places before anyone could improve upon it.
32:55 to exit out of the dns lookup, you can do Ctrl+Shift+6 (idk why this is it, but thanks cisco!) And if you want it to disable it completely you should be able to do "no ip domain lookup"
The box has two amphenol connectors because you could loop through from one box to another for multiple phones in a large room or something like that
Yep, that unit supports dual power supplies. That bracket is part of the PSU Support.
Is there really no way for the call traffic from the FXS card to interface with the modem though the backplane? Seems like that would be much cleaner, though I guess this would never really be expected to be used like that.
You can buy integrated modem cards which do exactly that! I'll probably upgrade to that eventually
@@clabretro can't wait! You'll be catching up with The Serial Port soon enough!
The Microcom modem came with Microcom Network Protocol (MNP)
I also have a feeling, if I am not crazy, that there was a (upwards of) 48 port switch module that could slide into that larger upper slot.
There would also be a PoE power supply module that would be installed internally to supply 48V to that switch module.
Or I'm confusing this with something that was available for the 3800 series.
Thanks for another great video! Enjoying the nostalgia and content immensely.
If you're ever interested in exploring T1/PRI stuff, I have oodles of central office side and customer prem gear. Would be happy to donate. Much more fun than running the T1 cards back-to-back. Not to mention it looks cool in the rack 😊
Hey, I have an old AT&T workstation if you want it. Might be a 386. Think the computer was used by a local ISP for their networking back in the day. I live in Colorado.
At 11:45 i read ocol as cool and was like yeah it is.
I'm waiting for clabretros video in the year 2056 of setting up PON.
If that controller card in the 3745 is removable, in true Cisco fashion I'm betting the chassis base SKU that article used for comparison didn't include the controller card, which is why it's seemingly cheaper. Tough to track down the old datasheets and ordering information now though (at least before I got bored lol).
PIRATES! 😂 That is a really nice modem. I don't remember the brand at all.
haha I don't remember them either. seems solid though
13:45 That connector is probably just the voltage rails so a redundant supply can exist without a duplicate set of cables onto the mainboard
Dialup connections are nice and they are slow but they are capable enough to transfer text over the connection like in 1990-2003
I’m building something similar to this right now with a 2951 and a Nortel BCM50 (just because I want to support some Nortel phones too). However it’ll live in a rolling SKB 6U flight case to take to VCFs and other meetups!
21:45 careful now, you might get stuxnet, I'm kidding
the xylinx spartan thing is an fpga, basically a programmable chip, likely doing some dsp function in this case.
It's been well over a decade since I've interacted with a genuine Cisco CLI, but aside from the suggestions others have also offered, I seem to have Ctrl-R burned into my muscle memory as something that'll "redraw" the current input line for you in case it gets messed up by asynchronous logging output.
You need some extreme network switches to match those purple boxes.