Carsten Groß: Internet and networking

Networking

Networking in the dormitory "Heilmeyersteige" (in Ulm, Germany)

During my time at the university I lived in a dormitory in Ulm, called Wohnheim Heilmeyersteige. This dormitory was connected to the world wide internet via a dual ISDN link (128 kbit/s) in 1994. At this time the public was somewhat unaware of the "internet". At the start of the dormitory networking I was a "testuser". At the beginning there were big problems connecting the computers to the broadband network. Until today the computers are connected with so called cable modems to the coaxial TV cabling and the maximum transfer speed is 4 MBit/s for everybody in the dormitory (A broadcast domain with 150 high-traffic users). Additionally the students owning a cable modems are required to pay a monthly fee for one of the modems.

Yabri, a networking bridge for PCs

Due to the monthly costs I wrote a program called yabri (Yet another Bridge) together with Rainer to share one modem for many users (we had subnets of up to 20 users in the dormitory). You can use yabri on a 286 PC with DOS and networking cards to "bridge" a LAN to the cable modem - in these times commercial network switches or bridges were really expensive, therefore are homemade application to reuse all the old 286 machines. In the years beginning from 1995 up to 1999 I and some other inhabitants of the dormitory had yabri in use. Unfortunatly the last installation of yabri in Ulm was killed on Nov., 24. 2001. It was named yabri01.wh-hms.uni-ulm.de. Yabri has the smallest IP stack ever seen

Again: Networking in dormitory "Heilmeyersteige" (Ulm, Germany)

Since april 2001 the dormitory Heilmeyersteige is connected via (Dark) fiber to the University and connected to the internet very fast now.

in Nuermberg

My network today

After moving from Ulm to Nürnberg in 1999 I lost my permanent internet connection. I bought a telephone modem, but this is not the "real thing" if you are used to the comfort of a permanent connection to the internet. In the history you'll find a small abstract about the history of the internet connection.

Networking and WLAN

To make networking easy I installed also a WLAN. A Linksys WRT54GS provides the WLAN and connects the components to each other. The advantage of the Linksys router is that it provides a Linux shell if you install an open firmware like OpenWRT. This is running since Jun 15, 2005 now. Unfortunatly no longer as internet connection since my move to Ulm. As a special feature I activated IPv6 on the router like on my former "big" machine.

In former times I used an ELSA Lancom L-11 AP. To query this access point for online hosts, I wrote a small perl script.

The image shows the accesspoint and router "boa" with the WLAN antenna.

I added a simple TCP configuration to improve the behaviour if the connection if you do bulk data transfers to the SuSE SDB.