A.3 IP Connectivity

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One of our first goals was to get the Internet connection up and running.

A.3.1 Lesson: Set milestones and stick to them.

Setting up an Internet service provider and a commercial Internet service is a huge task. I broke the job down into smaller, understandable chunks. Each chunk had its own milestone: a thing that was to be accomplished, and a date by which it was supposed to be accomplished.

On a piece of paper, I sketched out my first set of goals and milestones:

July 1, 1995 Get leased line installed.
Mid-July Get IP connection up and running.
August 1 Get dialup access working to router.
August 15 Open up service for a few testers.
September 1, 1995 Announce service to the community.

The key ingredient to making all of this work was working phone lines something that the house didn't have when we moved in. Before we closed on the house, we placed an order for four residential phone lines after all, the house was first and foremost a residence. I had also made arrangements with a mid-level ISP in Cambridge called CentNet for a 56K connection to the Internet that would be delivered over a four-wire DDS frame relay connection. To make this whole thing work I arranged for Cisco to loan me a Cisco 2509 router a basic router with two high-speed serial ports, eight low-speed asynchronous serial ports, and an Ethernet. I foolishly thought of this router as an "ISP in a box."

A.3.2 Lesson: Get your facilities in order.

I waited for and met the NYNEX telephone installer on the day our residential phone lines were due to be installed. The man wanted to run four separate black two-conductor lines from the telephone pole to the house. I told him that probably wouldn't be enough, as we were having the 56K leased-line installed as well as additional lines as time went on. The installer said that he could bring in a 12-pair cable, which, he thought, would last us for quite a while. I told him that it wouldn't.

A week later, the NYNEX installer was at my front door again, with an order to install 4 lines for the Centrex that we had ordered. He was glad that he put in the 12-pair: eight of the pairs were already in use!

Before the end of the next month, we had saturated the 12-pair cable and we needed more. We were working through a dealer, and we told him that we wanted to have the facility issue resolved for a long time. Thanks to his advocacy with NYNEX, we made arrangements to have a 100-pair cable installed to our house from the street. To have this installed the street needed to be blocked off for half a day and a pair of large telephone company trucks snaked the cable from a junction box three blocks away to my house. We had to cut a large hole in the side of the house to bring in the cable, then set up a space on a plywood wall where the telephone company's termination equipment could be installed.

The 100-pair lasted us for the better part of three years, but we outgrew even that. Unfortunately, at that point, we didn't have any room left in the basement: we had to expand to across the street!

A.3.3 Lesson: Test your facilities before going live.

A week after the installation of the 12-pair, the installer was at my door one more time, this time to put the 56K line in place. I plugged in a CSU/DSU that I bought from CentNet and plugged the Cisco into the CSU/DSU. The first thing that I learned was that my Cisco was running a version of Cisco's operating system that was many months out of date. We downloaded a new version of the operating system over the frame relay connection and set up my network with an IP address in CentNet's CIDR block. Logging into the Cisco router from my laptop, I could telnet to my Unix workstation (an old NeXTstation) that was still at my old house in Cambridge.

A.3.4 Lesson: Provide for backup facilities before, during, and after your transition.

The next day, I moved the NeXTstation from Cambridge to Martha's Vineyard, saying good-bye to my old ISP and hello to my new provider. The house in Cambridge had its own Class C network (204.17.195) and I wanted to keep using those IP addresses. Unfortunately, some sort of strange routing problem cropped up, and I didn't have real Internet connectivity with my old Class C network until the next day. Mail bounced because we didn't have an MX server specified in the DNS configuration.

only for RuBoard - do not distribute or recompile