Ethernet History

[Roger M. Jenson]

I know that at least one other member has lived through the Ethernet
battles so when I bumped into a YouTube video titled "TWISTED: The
dramatic history of twisted-pair Ethernet" I knew that I had to share
the following link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8PP5IHsL8Y

Have Fun,
Roger M. Jenson

[Tom]

One of my first jobs involving Ethernet involved using a vampire tap on "frozen yellow garden hose" aka 10Base5, aka Thicknet cable, which was thick coax, a little under a half-inch in diameter. You had to find the paint marks on it located every 2.5 meters, and core into the cable with a special tool at the mark, and attach the tap with a screw, using an allen wrench. The tap connected to a MAU - Media Access Unit. The MAU terminated in an AUI port, which was a D-shell connector with (I think) 15 pins.

 

Later, at the same job, I helped connect DEC fan-out devices. I think it was called a DEQNA and it was some sort of multiport repeater. Or maybe that was the DEMPR-AA. Yeah, that's more likely. There was also a DELNI. There was a whole eco-system of expensive DEC boxes for getting in/out of ThickNet. It was a device that had an AUI port as the input and a number of ThinNet coax BNC outputs, aka 10Base2. The only examples I can find are the 8-port version, but I think there was a bigger one.

 

Oh, I see a DELNI on a web page--it has a row of male 15-pin AUI connectors and a female one for your ThickNet connection. It's essentially a hub.

 

See this article: https://www.mattmillman.com/projects/10base5/

 

Trivia: I still have a spool of ThickNet cable in my porch. Might be a few hundred feet of it. The spool is robust enough to support a car.

 

From that box, there was a run of ThinNet coax to a row of cubes. in the baseboard of each cube, we'd install a rectangular connector with a shorting bar inside it. That way, only a single cable ran to the workstation, instead of the more common loop of two cables. When the cable was unplugged from the baseboard connector, the shorting bar insured continuity to the next workstation. But leaving that plugged in and unplugging it at the workstation could cause problems.

 

At the end of each run of coax, there had to be a 50-ohm termination resistor.

 

Ah, younger days.

 

-T

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[Roger M. Jenson]

DEC had their proprietary network equipment before Ethernet. I am thankful that Ethernet won.

 

Having Fun,

Roger M. Jenson

 

 

"Tom" a50m...@gmail.com – December 31, 2024 2:42 PM
 

[Tom Landmann]

Oh, the memories.. Thanks for sharing that!

[Tom]

Hey y'all, I bought a widget many years ago and now I need to use it. It's a Linksys/Cisco PAP2 analog phone ATA, a phone in/SIP out box. Unfortunately, I never tried it out and now that I no longer know where I got it, I find that it's locked. For a lot of reasons, the PAP2 with more recent firmware like my Firmware Version: 3.1.9(LSc) can't be unlocked using well-known default passwords.

 

It's configured to get a DHCP address, and when you go to that address in a web browser, you get a ton of information about the device.

 

There is a telephone user interface, and you pick up a phone connected to it, dial **** and then type the command to reset it: 73738#. It asks for confirmation, and behold! The device is reset to factory. But it's not. It still displays the information page, but it still has the original DNS settings, still shows "Customized" -- the DNS servers are owned by Vonage, a very bad sign. It uses the vonage DNS servers as the first two, with my local DNS server as the third.

 

I downloaded John the Ripper and couldn't make that work on this device. I found a very long video on using Hydra for something like this. I downloaded a lot of cool word lists and such, and installed Burp Suite to try to intercept the login process.  That worked, but it looks nothing like the example in the video. His device has a crafted logon screen, mine just asks the browser to get credentials, so I get a borwser pop-up "This site is asking you to sign in"

 

GET /admin/ HTTP/1.1

Host: 172.20.0.102

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:134.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/134.0

Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8

Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5

Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br

DNT: 1

Sec-GPC: 1

Connection: keep-alive

Referer: http://172.20.0.102/

Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1

Priority: u=0, i

Authorization: Digest username="user", realm="pap admin", nonce="0023840bedf0d626e4ebfa915aacd1e113eb7017", uri="/admin/", algorithm=MD5, response="2af789c6457a0d74b520a46799ab7744", opaque="00238083a547c9c97194e22b93458fac3ed18aa8", qop=auth, nc=00000001, cnonce="69f83bfde3808bc0"

 

The example in the video captures a POST, and shows the dummy username and password that I typed. What I got back from Burp is a GET, with the username shown, but the password apparently tokenized.

 

I don't know how to proceed. I might be screwed. I see a lot of people with the same problem on the internet, but no good answers.

 

-T

 

 

 

[Tom]

Anyone done an in-place upgrade of Fedora or similar?

 

I know historically that that they advice has always been "don't." But I've seen a number of instructionals on reddit and etc for doing this. Here's one:

 

sudo dnf upgrade --refresh

sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=40

dnf system-upgrade reboot

 

There are others out there, like this one:

 

sudo dnf upgrade --refresh 

sudo dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade

sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=40

sudo dnf upgrade --refresh

I have Visual Studio Code installed, which was a pain to get fully configured, and other stuff, and I don't want to have to rebuild completely.

 

-Tom

[Tom]

Anyone done an in-place upgrade of Fedora or similar?

 

I know historically that the advice has always been "don't." But I've seen a number of instructionals on reddit and etc for doing this. Here's one:

[Sean Malloy]

Tom,

Yes, I do in place Fedora upgrades. I have 5 computers running Fedora desktop. Two of those desktop machines have VSCode installed. I also have one computer running Fedora server.

I do in place upgrades on all 6 of of these computers.

I hope that helps.

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Sean Malloy

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[Tom]

Thanks Sean. That does help.

 

Any caveats? Stuff I should make sure I do in preparation?

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[Sean Malloy]

Tom,

I just follow the documentation: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/upgrading-fedora-offline/

Making sure you have a backup before starting is a good idea. So far I've been lucky and have never had any issues with in place upgrades.

Thanks.

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[Tom]

The upgrade from Fedora 39 to 40 went flawlessly, despite the instructions being for an upgrade from 39 to 41. Subsituted "40" for "41" in one place, and Bob's yer uncle.

 

Better still, Jellyfin was upgraded to a functioning version automagically.

 

After it settles a bit, I'm on to version 41.

 

Thanks Sean.

 

-T

[Sean Malloy]

Awesome. Glad it worked.

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[Tom]

I just did another in-place upgrade from Fedora 39 -> 40, then 40 -> 41, on a Core i5 Dell Optiplex mini

 

The 39 --> 40 upgrade was fast & easy.

 

The 40 --> 41 took so long I thought it was hung. When I got the monitor to wake up (the monitor is a little twitchy) it was scrolling thousands of lines of logging about what it was doing.

It did that for better than 10 minutes.

 

But now it's up on Fedora 41 and looks good.

 

-T

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