RE: Back to College: Networking

Gough Lui — Sun, 07 Oct 2018 01:16:47 GMT

Networking has come a long way from the early days. Pre-Ethernet, there were a number of different standards - LattisNet, Token Ring and later StarLAN as well. When thin-net 10BASE2 came around, the cost of deploying Ethernet fell quite dramatically and really sealed the fate of others. I do remember seeing vampire taps on thick coax with AUI media attachment interfaces in some older buildings on my university campus - along with a Racal InterLAN Repeater. But many smaller areas used disjoint thin-net networks just for a few terminals (e.g. the library in my primary school). Fond days (or not) of Novell NetWare running on those.

I still have some old AUI gear, hubs, 10BASE2 equipment on show on my website in case anyone wants to relive some nostalgia -

BOOTP hasn't been mentioned for a while now - most of the time, remote booting has settled on PXE as the "standard" which uses TFTP to transfer the images and DHCP for configuration. There was a time when RPL was also used for remote booting.

Nice to hear some guys still running static addressing - I still do that myself, especially for my servers and instruments where I don't want any address changes. The rest of the network runs DHCP - on a non-overlapping IP-range. Of course, modern people still recommend running DHCP and setting a static lease on the server - which I can do - but I've had instances where I've had to reboot a router and a device needed to renew its lease at roughly the same time resulting in broken connectivity. Static IPs are still good for limited handfuls of devices, but if you change your network architecture (i.e. new subnet for certain devices), having to manually reconfigure each can be a little annoying.

I can't draw my network since it's actually extremely complicated owing to the circumstances, but I've lately become a fan of Mikrotik gear because of all the wonderful things one can do with it (for roughly the same price of a regular consumer router). I'm making active use of VLANs, multiple WANs, multiple Virtual-APs with different encryption on each, rate-limiting queues, VPN (L2TP/PPTP) etc. It will only evolve even further as I get (finally) connected to a decent WAN service - I'm living mostly off LTE (8-100Mbit/s depending on congestion) and long-range Wi-Fi (2Mbit/s backup) at the moment, otherwise it's ADSL2+ with only ~3Mbit/s speed.

https://goughlui.com/2018/08/17/tested-vlans-in-the-home-through-dumb-switches/

It's always interesting just how complicated one can make a network, but also how useful it can become now with home automation (e.g. lighting control), VoIP, surveillance, video streaming, file/print sharing being more commonly deployed even within normal houses.

- Gough