Rolling with the Halloween theme of spooks, ghosts, and skeletons in the closet; let’s have some fun and
talk about Network Topology Horror Stories! I have had some interesting nightmares in my professional
past and there is one that still gives me chills to this day!
Many moons ago (actually it was 2009), so not long enough ago for me to forget, I walked into a “Data
Center” to evaluate and “fix” the network. Normally this is not a big deal as most Data Center networks
are well designed and easy to understand and fun to work on. Well, this was definitely not one of those
networks!
This “Data Center” network was one that I could never have dreamed of. Just looking around the room
it felt like if I was in a computer museum. The core routers installed and running in this “Data Center”
were Wellfleet Backbone Node routers! If you are not familiar with Wellfleet routers you should count
yourself lucky! A quick history to see how bad this actually was - Wellfleet merged with SynOptics back
in 1994 to form Bay Networks, and then Bay Networks was acquired by Nortel in 1998. So as you can
see, those routers were surely ancient!
Sadly, it does not end there either as it does get worse. The “Data Center” had a raised floor and I
thought good, right!? Raised floor, should be some nice cable trays, power routing, etc. Well what I
found under that raised floor was tons of 10Base5 cabling sprawled all over the place – i.e. ThinkNet! So
that means there were dozens of blinking Vampire Taps and AUI adapters to interconnect all the devices
in that data center. Remember this was 2009, the last time I used an AUI adapter was for my Cisco 2500
Console server in my CCIE lab!
I wish that was the worst of it and the end of this story, but there was one more thing that still baffles
me to this day. There were some newer switches and technology in the data center as well, not much
but some. So the customer needed to get the 10Base5 WellFleet network to talk to the newer switches
and devices on that network. So what did think they would do to accomplish this? They took an AUI
adapter on the 10Base5 network and connected it via an RJ45 cable to a 66 punch down block. That
block was then connected to a switch via another ethernet cable punched down to the same 66 block
and connected to the switch. And yes, there were other devices on that 66 block as well – purely
baffling how anything even worked there!
Needless to say, when I was done with that data center it was updated. No more Wellfleet. No more
10Base5.
That is my horror story. What’s yours?