Multiple Homelab Dial-up Lines
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- Опубликовано: 21 сен 2024
- Using a variety of old Cisco gear to expand my homelab dial-up setup from one line to multiple (available concurrently!) I'll figure out how to use Voice Interface Cards and set them up as an ATA, then we'll test the whole thing with a couple computers and a Dreamcast.
Previous Dial-up Video: • Homelab Dial-Up
Installing IOS Versions: • Cisco GigaStack Cluster
Check me out on Patreon: / clabretro
Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio
#cisco #retrotech #homelab #dialup
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I am impressed by how much attention my 5yr old son paid to your video. And he asked me if we could use a modem with my Cisco routers. Great video
ha that's great
you raised him well :). Keep doiing what you're doing!
And both of us live in a same world which I didn't have slightest idea what a modem is when i was 5 😂
@@alisharifian535 my son knows these things because I've been in the business since he was a few months old. And he even came to work with me.
just noticed you have 33.6k subscribers... perfect timing.
haha!
Having been a Cisco Voice guy for 20ish years, this has been fun to watch. I’m more in sales than engineering now, but for 11 years I installed more of all of these devices than I can even count. It was a new frontier, moving from copper analog into IP.
very cool!
CUCM is now obsolete, and it's successor is Cisco Unity.
I've tried living vicariously through your videos, but find myself searching for 20 year old Cisco gear (and IBM!)... I'll give my wife your details when she questions all the "new" gear 😂
haha
next: Home DOCSIS cable network
oh yeah
A CMTS in the lab would be fantastic. A bit pricey but fun.
we need this video.
I would LOVE to see this
at a certain point you’ll have a whole-ass headend. add voip and you’re running triple play
Lol, you just built the most complicated/advanced PBX.
I just went on ebay and bought an 8 port PBX for $40. It came with all the cables and a manual. I wired it into my house phone lines so when you call my house, you get a message asking you to enter an extension and we can call from the bedroom to the basement.
But this was way more fun to watch you setup.
nice! yeah I decided to take the long route haha
Жена тебя еще не проклянула за это ?
I'm so glad to see you and The Serial Port venture into Homelab Dial-Up. As someone born after the age of the old internet, I was always curious about what it was like and how it truly felt to "dial in". I can't wait to see where you take this, clab.
P.S: I saw that old school Apple Airport Base Station in your background, delving into the OG 802.11 Wifi, huh?
glad you're enjoying it! and yup I'll mess with that airport eventual
As someone who grew up with dial-up and then eventually DSL, I can tell you it was absolutely magical. Being able to do stuff like read game walkthroughs on GameFAQs was just crazy. We used to print them out and put them in binders because it was easier to use while playing PlayStation or Genesis. Instant messaging was also incredible although I only got into that after we switched to DSL. After a few years of using dial-up, and knowing faster speeds were out there, it was frustrating. Being able to watch Strong Bad emails as they were released was awesome but they took ages to load on dial-up. I remember the first time I downloaded a video game, it was Starsiege Tribes and it was something like 70MB. It took multiple sessions, and lots of pausing the download so the computer could be turned off at night, but eventually it downloaded and I remember being absolutely blown away. I played solo for ages, learning how to use the various weapons and ships... Then the first time I played multiplayer some script kiddie just floated at the top of the map with unlimited jetpack and ammo and just did automatic headshots on everyone, right through objects on the map. I couldn't figure out how I was being killed at first and then my friend told me it was someone cheating. So my first online gaming experience was also my first experience to cheaters. 😅
Haha, this is awesome. Especially the Dreamcast at the end; even if the browser didn't work, at least PSO did! I can't wait to see 3745 decked out and running all of your dial-up.
Loving all the homelab videos.
If you want to keep going down the voice rabbit hole, you could look at setting up a hunt group. That would let you dial a single number and it would ring the next available modem port. Kind of like how your ISP would be able to connect many callers on a single phone number into a bank of modems.
Oh man. I watched about the first 5 minutes right when you got to the FXO/FXS part. I've done a lot with Asterisk... and its one of those things where I just love playing with that equipment. I'm going to watch the rest of the video later, but I just had to comment about that and what was going to happen. Look forward to seeing the discoveries that lead to future-you.
The main reason why modem cards are rare is because dial up ISPs used T1 cards on their end to receive incoming dialup calls. Remember, t1 was primarily a telephone trunk with 24 phone lines multiplexed digitally. The new stuff like 56k requires that the ISP has a T1 card. There isn't physical hardware modems and the modem stuff is done in software.
that cable modem brought up some memories. cable internet is neat because it's basically IP over MPEG, which is a very odd thing to say.
Remember haxoware ?
These adventures are such a joy. Great formula, great storyboarding, focused without being boring, well filmed, well edited, always tickle a curiosity or the ol' nostalgia bone. Thanks for continuing to share!
Cisco IOS version numbers are an over-complicated subject in themselves. Since you're using older Enterprise kit, images with a "T" suffix indicate an Early Deployment release train where new features were added. The T codebase would at some point become the next "M" release train which indicates General Deployment and would thereafter receive bugfixes only. So the sequence would go (say) 12.1(1)T 12.1(2)T 12.1(3)T 12.2(1)M 12.2(2)M etc, showing 3 releases with new features being added and then only being stabilised in the M train. When 12.2(1)M is created, the T train then moved on to 12.2(1)T and new features start goign in there. The number after the T or M is a rebuild number, which indicates a bugfix rebuild of that particular release. You also had one version with something like an XA suffix, this indicates a Special release that was typically shipped just to support a new piece of hardware where they didn't want to wait for the next actual release. These are generally bad news for stability and you should get off them onto a later M or T release if possible !
Don't forget the ED suffix - 'Early Deployment', as I recall. The numbering is really screwy. The naming, at least, lets you know fairly easily what you have - ADVIPSERVICESK9 - Advanced IP Services, with Crypto. IPSERVICES would be basic routing as I recall, I seem to recall the advanced adds additional protocols - something makes me thing you need advanced for BGP, but it has been quite a while since I dealt with those. The K9 is the crypto indicator. IPVOICEK9 has voice features, but minimal routing protocol support, I think. K9 so it does include crypto. I think the UNIVERSALK9 might have required additional licensing to enable features? Like I said - been a while :D
Youre going wild. I just setup two Cisco 2901's with a T1 between them and have 1 computer on each end dialing in (using the wic-1am-v2 modems). I was even able to get a Halo lan party going between the two. I'll make a video soon about it.
DUDE! you should run your own BBS! like, for all your subsribers, have an air-gapped long-distance-dialup BBS for us and other retro fans! that would be so Rad. Have a livestream that just shows video of whats happening on the BBS for all of us with no modem. Make Modems Cool Again!
Nice! On the dreamcast, your modem settings are centrally stored to 128KB flash (same place your language selection, time zone etc. are). Great video!
damn that is a hell of an upgrade the 2900 are still used to this day in some offices your crazy man no one in the right mind are doing this, you right up my alley kind of guy!! keep up the good work!!
I’m a new viewer and I think that I’ve binge watched all of your videos - this one in particular has activated my desire to build my own dialup ISP; I’ve already bought several Cisco 2600s from Cisco and crimped my own T1 cables. Thanks for the motivation!
that's awesome!
Huh, I'm in a different industry but never knew 100% what FXO/FXS is outside my work but that makes sense now. I work on 911 systems and we use FXO for non-emergency lines (telco gives tone) and FXS for 911 (we give tone). I was always taught O for office, S for sirens but until now didn't realize they are generic acronyms.
I really like your error explainations. It's excellent and endearing. Also great that we're in danger of learning something. It's a bit different for different parts of the world with different telephone standards.
I'm a 34 year old Dad and Husband. I'm currently studying for my certs. I just want to say that since I discovered your Channel, having your videos on in the background has helped me study. It's not even the nostalgia, but the atmosphere your style of video gives off. No yelling or overreacting, thanks for keeping it "chill".
glad to hear that!
Networking was much more fun back in the day before practically every thing was ethernet. Ethernet is much easier to manage and scales to ridiculous speed, but dealing with all these old telecom media types really gets the Grey beard network admin in me nostalgic.
I setup a Cisco 2900 router to use as a Cisco PBX for Cisco IP phones for a Charter school. It’s still being used to this day! Those routers are solid built! You should try setting up a PBX and run Cisco UCME and get some Cisco IP phones for fun! (:
Great video! If you’re willing to go deeper into this rabbit hole and are looking for 56kbps modem connections, check the PVDM-12DM for your 2821 or 2900.
They are high density digital modems that handles blazing speed V.92 modem calls, as long you’re feeding them calls from BRI or T1/E1 links with specific WICs.
It might not be doable with a single device however, but homelabing is not a hobby about convenience.
This was a fun adventure. For that DNS problem for your Dreamcast, can you look at your firewall or see if you can capture that DNS traffic to see what it is trying to query? You can then set up a local DNS server and then forward that request somewhere that works. You could probably serve it a blank page and it would work. Give that a try!
I think something like that will be the next step!
Thank you for this! I was inspired by your last dialup video and bought a Cisco 1760 planning to replicate your setup with ATAs. Learning about the FXS and PVDMs is even better, I should be able to do two dialup lines in 1u with the 1760 and have some WIC slots left for T1 and fast Ethernet.
I'm nostalgic for rooting around in IOS now. Love this video!
I have a TENOR AX. Now you have given me motivation to use it
Oh my god, the more I watch the more I'm getting turned on
Hypothetically. I have a bunch of T1 as well. Could a IP-Serial adaptor be used to link them? T1 was a dream in my youth. I'd like to make an old school comms setup. Would you be interested in creating an isolated link o my rack here?
Dial up: You'd need 8 of these!
Ethernet: You'd need 1,000 of these! (100mbps vs 100gigabit)
Love your videos on this old tech! You have so much passion and it's really inspiring!! Thanks so much for your videos!
Glad you like them!
Ah! These videos remind me of 99/2001, when I was 17/18 years old and I was setting up an ISP here in Brazil.
I used to do callbacks so I could use the internet 24 hours a day, since the ISP paid VERY little per minute (there was no such thing as unlimited calls, we paid for each "pulse" - 4 in 4 minutes)
As a network engineer of many years who now manages a bunch of software engineers (who couldn't care less about networking), your content warms my heart.
@21:38 - You don’t need to swap the pair colours (sorry spelling from England) they are not transmit and receive on one pair. Loved this content :-)
30 years ago I was working on switching computers from a leased line (PtP) network to a "dialup" tcp/ip network using the same cables. We used a dial-in controller (can't remember the brand) and normal 56.4 modems, and it worked. One thing most people do not know you can connect two modems to each other without having to use dialup - you just have to a cross over cable, and then tell the modem that the line is up - no dial-up is required.
I know it's not as fun as playing around with Cisco stuff 😊
My first hands on with Cisco was on a 2900-series. Good memories!
Okay I think it is officially time, you need to use (existing?) phone lines in the house and setup a local phone or intercom system.
No existing... but plenty of cat5e 😏
At the beginning of my career, in 2003-4 I worked in Cisco service entitlement and I spent my days authorising replacement router modules. I recognise basically all of these devices and parts simply by their product IDs (SUP-2T, WIC-1DS, etc). I had no idea what they were at the time, so it's nice for me to be able to see what they all actually were, 20 years later.
That ending with the Dreamcasts caught me so off guard lmao
Beautiful. It's wonderful now how we can just live out our dialiest of dialtone dreams that we could never do as a kid in the 90's and 2000's.
Do 56k. It will be A LOT more work and headache, but the extra 22.4k of throughput will make it worth it. Get an Ascend MAX (for the ISP side) and setup a Cisco router with some VICs (as the telco side), and then run a T1/PRI between them. Bonus points for demonstrating MPPP and or ISDN!
As someone who works for a MSP that provides voice services, we use FXS ports as ATAs all the time. Mostly just for fax lines, but occasionally an analog cordless phone or a port facing an analog intercom or paging system.
That phone/network wiring was so jank it brings back fond memories. Thank you!
Dude your stuff is as always top notch, but the Dreamcast was like a cherry on top! I never had a console as a kid, and Dreamcast always fascinated me later on. Awesome stuff, thanks for sharing!
I made this comment before I saw your Dreamcast hoard! >:[
haha. they're in rooouuugh shape. lots of broken gdroms
So clunky... Says the Man with a Dial-Up ISP in his basement... LOLS
😉
Loved this video. Reminds me of that short era where I ran not exactly the same hardware at home to connect my home phone to a SIP provider. Very cool
I was just going to take a peep at this video before I had to go out... here I am 38 minutes later, just got hooked. Great job with the casual yet detailed explanations, real easy and fun to follow along. I've done dial-up before using an analog PBX, a Windows XP machine, and a PowerBook G4, but now you've kind of got me regretting not saving one of the 2811s from recycling at my old job. I think I have a new old stock 1811 in storage though, you've given me a reason to open it up and mess with it.
Job well done, Colby
Well this was an unforseen blast from the past with the dreamcast - a little bit from now, someone will hire you as chief dial-up officer😂
Oh maan.. you have to do a lab tour some day.. amazing content as always
For some fun try using the aux port in the router to your computer and try and get a PPP or SLIP connection going. I used to do this a long time ago with my laptop as we often did not have Ethernet ports in our POPs. You can also connect two routers directly over the aux ports (with the right pinout) and get PPP to work. The aux port can also be used to hook up a modem for PPP or backdoor console access. It is unfortunate that this port is so often overlooked.
Dont stress about the FXS/FXO ports.
I've been a telephony engineer for 20 years, and when I started I got it wrong for years!
Aaah. A great final video before going to bed, educational, but I doubt a lot will actually stay in my head. 😂
I love Cisco stuff 😍😍😍
The 2900 series is still super common in installs I see. Honestly not my favourite, but it's fine. Haha
Fun fact I used to tear those 2911 out from CVS locations and replace them with newer dell emc or silicon routers.
always interesting to see you mess around with some older hardware, i look forward to the upcoming videos
I bought a cheapo 8-line small business PBX off AliExpress a few years ago for my version of this project on a budget... it worked pretty well! It was a bit janky with non-standard dialtone so about 20% of the modems I tried didnt' like it. I had it set up so that the first four ports were client ports, and if you dialled an internal extension it'd do call hunting to find the first available server port, so I only had to remember one number for dialing up to the ISP and could have multiple machines dialled up at once. It was super fun!
Wow. This stuff is pretty cool. I've seen some Cisco stuff for sale cheap and was thinking about buying some to play around with. Makes me think I should have a crack at it. Subbed for the journey.
Imagine being a Systems Engineer back in the day. Yes the standardized form factors were great (manufacturing efficiencies)... but man did it take me a career to get customers to pay attention to the modules, and the writing on the modules, and the IOS versions.
My favorite was when a customer forwarded me an exchange with our tech support. A router was reporting both power supplies as failed. The customer provided tech support the CLI response from the router. Tech support asked..... if the router was still up. To which the customer provided the show interface output....
Still have that framed and hanging on the wall.
Around year 2000 i worked on a 3600 with 2x30 isdn lines 🤓👍
Dial up Cisco 681 for work from home and Cisco 801 for costumer support
Was very sad to hear "two of them" but not see two lovely grey kittens
Yes, two of them (CRD) 😹😹
I thought meant ISPs in the 90s had T1s and a Cisco concentrator. 63 lines all in one Jack that looks like ether net.
They even supported bonding 2 lines for faster speed. And would take smallish or ISDN calls.
Ugh Don't get me started about the convoluted Cisco documentation. It's quite the miracle you found everything and got it working. Usually you find references to Cisco pages that don't longer exist and/or simply have false and incomplete information. Excellent video!
This is great, i did the exact thing about 2 months ago except instead of using modem cards on a second router I bought an old terminal server and connected the modems to it and it to my network. I think i should find those modem cards now....
plus I really want that 4g card, use it as a backup encase my main isp goes down.
This is Awesome
awesome and outstanding! this is really the content I subscribed for! thank you as always!
You have the neatest hobby, and I adore your channel.
I have seen Cisco's 16 port modem module and I have used the module in past years for about two years. Modem ports can be used also through TCP ports. Each modem has its own TCP port number. The modem connection can be established remotely using TCP ports and a computer. The connection is then between the computer and the Cisco modem port. 👍
nice!
Hey man! That cellular module.... I'm trying to really find one that works in my country, and I can't wait for you to tinker with yours! I think it's for backup Internet connections as you said. But yeah awesome job on this video!
it's probably 3g or even GSM so I doubt it'll still work in the US. Those were probably used for out of band access to the router CLI when things go wonky.
@@v12alpine they made 4G LTE EHWIC modules too.... So maybe it will still work.
i so remember dialup internet from 2003-2004 i use to use AOL and MSN dialup back then oh boy i miss those days
Great video as always 👍🏻
18:33 -- More detail the better. It's great to follow along.
wow!!! i love the dreamcast and keyboard!! and the cisco units of course!!! great video! excited to try my dreamcast!hooked up on line as well!your video made my day.....
Very cool vid. Hard to belive PSO still has servers you can connect too. Love it.
My setup was a Cisco 1760 with an VIC-2FXS, a VWIC-2MFT-E1-DI (E1 is the standard in Australia), and of course the obligatory PVDM module, which accepts the calls and routes them out the E1 line to the second router, a 3725 with a NM-HDV, including a full complement of PVDM modules and a VWIC-2MFT-E1-DI in its VWIC slot, and a NM-30DM in the second NM slot. The digital modems allow the full 56K downstream speed, instead of being limited to the 33.6K upstream speed of a regular analogue modem, but that NM and the digital modem cards to go with it can be quite expensive unless you happen to find one in a router and the seller doesn't know what it is (which is how I got mine).
That was all a long time ago, so I can't remember exactly how it was configured, I just remember I couldn't dial directly into the digital modems, it had to go through an E1 (or T1) connection. And because I only had the one voice WIC slot in the NM-HDV module, I couldn't put the E1 card plus the FXS card into the one router and do it all on one box. Eventually I did get a 3845, which would have more than enough slots to do it all, but that was years later, after I'd disassembled that setup to use for other lab configs many times, and apparently I didn't keep a copy of the router configs, so I would've had to build it again from scratch.
That said, I've enjoyed you showing me how much I've forgotten about voice configs. I do enjoy working on the older hardware, so hopefully you can get it all working on your older gear rather than that shiny "new" 2911.
as a CCNP Voice and RS its funny to see people messing around with my daily business. I was the admin for a leisure company running resorts with small huts, we had cabinets full of this stuff, we even run our own DSLAM and Docsis system. Those stuff is cheap available on european ebay.
I'm pretty sure they program that pause in just to give you a heart attack when you have to reload equipment. A nice little bit of spice to the process.
very cool stuff.
Very good video! Regards from Poland
Those rj45 to 11 splitters exist :)
what a coincidence, I'm setting up my own home dial up server too!
This is inspiring me to pick up my own at-home dial up project again. I'm going the route of having a Windows Server machine with a DIVA Dialogic PCI ISDN Media card, which is then going through its ISDN BRI connections to a Panasonic PBX, which is where the analog calls are routed to. In theory, that should allow V.90 connections to be possible. Last time I worked on it, for the life of me I couldn't get Windows Server on the Intel Atom board I was using to actually get any network traffic to the dial up connections, they'd establish the modem connection but were never forwarded to either LAN or WAN. One of these days, I'll try some other PC hardware to see if it's something odd with the Atom board.
Bro what a journey! I am going through the battle of finding the right cards to have a VOIP to PBX lab. It looks like I am not the only person on ebay buy super outdated stuff for learning.
Amazing work here. Great video.
Very impressed!
You create some awesome videos!! 🤘
Pouring out some juice to the homie Dreamcast. He lived and died soo young. The games looked awesome. Was it the timing? Sega BS? Not sure. Glad to see you got one of the little homies living his Dream.
Amazeballs network video again 😀
virtua tennis is by far one of the best dreamcast games ever created.
Oh no! Now I know what I am doing this summer! .... just what my retro collection needs lol
I’m unsure if they did that Cisco strikes me as a company who would have sold ISP equipment at that time so that business customers would have Cisco at both ends for a higher reliability
You are living the dream and have created the ultimate telephone play thing especially since there are Dreamcasts involvedI 😃 I am from the land of the blue Dreamcast swirl, can you set it to use dial and ringing tones from another country or is it fixed and you need to get cards made for that country if you prefer those ones?
yup! you can set the voice cards to different locales
Love your videos. How the heck do you learn and get hold of all these epic gear? Here in Sweden they seem mad expensive.
Saw your PSO HUmar was a Purplenum really should go for Skyly or Virida next time.
😔
Now all you have to do is fax from a computer a windows computer to a fax machine. that is the key like fax a webpage to a fax machine
You need to have all the modems in a hunt group so all your devices can dial the same number and they will be connected to whichever modem happens to be free.
that's the plan!
You should look into use a Digium or Sangoma T1/E1 Card and a 24 Port Channel bank
Yes! As mentioned. Please do a t1 trunking video.
Very neat. There's an internal 128KiB Flash memory that the Dreamcast uses a part of to store the Dream Passport, Dreamkey, and PlanetWeb browser settings, which is why it persists without a memory unit.
I'm working on a period-correct online Dreamcast game a little earlier than what you're going for and have a similar setup, though only the modem part with an AdTran TSU 600 and a Portmaster 3 for connecting to the network.
When looking for a backup unit for the TSU recently, it appears that there may be some restrictions on exporting communication equipment outside the US, I opted for a Cisco 3662 and a Lucent Max 6000 MX60 (E1 instead of T1, too). The Max is failing to power on, so until that gets fixed, I have no idea if the replacement will work.
You are making me want to get some stuff to play with. Just wish I had money
Really happy to see content like this! This is exactly what I like to do at home myself and I'm frankly a bit surprised that there isn't more YT tech people running setups like this to be able to show off modems and old phones. I have a 2951 running in my closet myself as both a router and a telephony PBX and it works a treat! The interesting part is that I have a WIC-1AM-V2 running in my 2951 so not sure if the pages still online about this WIC are too old to show compatibility with that WIC and the 29XX routers or if I have a slightly different version of it. Did you try putting the WIC-1AM-V2 in your 2911? My 2951 is for sure showing it as a "WIC-1AM-V2" and it is working correctly.
very cool, and thank you! you know I bet it'd be fine in there but I didn't even bother because in the end I'll be using that 8-AM somewhere else haha
@@clabretro Yeah, that card seems really nice! I've never seen the 8-AM before, guessing it's not compatible with my earlier 3825 router even though it has the correct slots. I know the newer routers (including the 29XX series and probably the 38XX) also have internal modem cards that you can put in the PVDM slots instead of the actual PVDMs to add modem clusters. I'm guessing those replaced the need for cards like the 8-AM but all of those I've found have been quite expensive so I ended up with just a WIC-1AM-V2 instead. Looking forward to any updates on what config you end up with eventually! 🙂