5 ms·

Remembering the LAN (2020)

180 points by udev4096 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
layoric 2y ago
Nice write up, took me back to running LANded NT in the same neck of the woods as the author up in Darwin :) Small world!
croon 2y ago
I started reading it out of remembrance of the LANs I went to in the 90s, but kept reading because of the experience of core logic having much less overhead then very much mirroring my own. Good writing and astute observations.
sgarland 2y ago
I also fondly remember IPX from when I was a kid. Red Alert 2 and Age of Empires II supported it, and it was truly zero-config on a small LAN. Then, eventually it died off, and I had to learn TCP. The author’s point about so much not being necessary today, while simultaneously having more drudge work is interesting. I’ve often thought the former, but hadn’t connected it to the latter. For example, I commandeered my family’s two PCs (a Celeron 333 MHz and a Pentium III 550 MHz – what a screamer!) at night to run distcc on, so that Gentoo builds would finish in a somewhat reasonable amount of time. This is simply not necessary anymore. Firefox, which used to be an overnight job, now compiles in 10-20 minutes for most modern CPUs. On the one hand, this is wonderful – faster feedback loops, more time to tinker. On the other hand, getting distcc set up back then was a fairly large undertaking for a kid, and taught you a good deal about a wide range of topics. Also, since the pain level of failure was so high, you were more careful to get it right the first time, lest you awaken to disappointment.
- tshaddox 2y ago
  > I also fondly remember IPX from when I was a kid. Red Alert 2 and Age of Empires II supported it, and it was truly zero-config on a small LAN. Interestingly, I recall Red Alert 2 only supporting IPX, and that causing tons of trouble for us at one LAN party when we tried to play it. Of course I may be remembering this wrong due to the passage of time and the fact that my technical skills were rudimentary at the time.
  - nortonsdad 2y ago
    I can't comment on Red Alert 2 in particular, but many early network multiplayer games predate widespread adoption of the internet so TCP/IP wasn't an option. Early online gaming services like Kali were almost a product built around a TCP/IP wrapper for IPX that allowed internet multiplayer on a platform it wasn't initially designed for. But it wasn't long before most people probably didn't even have the IPX protocol installed anymore.
  - swozey 2y ago
    Yeah I had basically the same system (Celeron 300a overclocked to a blazing 504mhz) and trying to play the same games with my dad over IPX was a huge problem. I don't remember why, just frustration and never wanting to use ipx. Definitely had problems with one of the Warcrafts, I assume 1 but maybe 2
    - cyberax 2y ago
      If you used pure DOS with a network driver, it JustWorked(tm)(r)(c). However, Windows 95 had its own implementation of IPX, and it sometimes had issues.
    - Aqua_Geek 2y ago
      Warcraft 2 definitely used IPX for multiplayer. I remember struggling to get an IPX driver installed on our family computers so we could play.
  - IntelMiner 2y ago
    Red Alert 2 in retrospect feels like an absolute "perfect storm" of bad luck that still produced a fantastic game RA2 runs on the same engine as Tiberian Sun (with minor modifications) Tiberian Sun was Westwood's first engine in C++ It was also two years behind schedule and pushed out barely functional after EA bought Westwood out in the late 1990's While Westwood was busy putting itself back together under EA they spun off "Westwood Pacific" and tasked them to make Red Alert 2 using this same engine Red Alert 2's engine is the most cantankerous, buggy piece of junk that ran what I would strongly argue was the pinnacle of the RTS genre. Getting it running on modern systems is an exercise in "what directdraw wrapper actually works?" and hoping that the UDP patch doesn't cause random game desyncs, even on a modern LAN
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- MisterTea 2y ago
  > I also fondly remember IPX from when I was a kid. IPX is the network layer and SPX was the transport layer on top. IPX can be used directly like UDP or the SPX protocol used when you need a guaranteed in-order byte pipe like TCP. Uses the MAC address as the machine address and was pretty light weight to the point where it out-performed IP in some cases. As a silly hobby project I want to take a stab at writing a user space IPX/SPX stack on Plan 9 and model it after ip(3). The stack would mount itself after /net providing /net/ipx and /net/spx, then you bind it to one or more Ethernet adapters. Programs wanting to listen or dial on IPX or SPX just put ipx!address!service instead of tcp!address!port for their dial strings. Then you could easily build IPX networks again and even easily tunnel them over whatever using 9P by mounting the stack on other machines.
  - sgarland 2y ago
    Ahhh, right. Networking is the area of tech where I learned enough to do what I needed, and then stopped. I keep meaning to get better at it. Your proposed project sounds like a fun way to do so!
- bombcar 2y ago
  distcc (for Gentoo!) still makes sense when you have some beast machines and a bunch of Raspberry Pis or similar.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
drpossum 2y ago
> Learning how to store passwords or add OAuth2 to your toy web site is not fun Hard disagree. OAuth2 is a neat technology and every personal thunk you run across or find yourself asking "why the heck do I need to do this? why can't I just do x?) trying to implement it is an important part of security and instructive on how to build a secure system where you can only trust components to do a minimal thing. Storing passwords (or really salted password hashes) is similar.
- jagged-chisel 2y ago
  You have not convinced me this is "fun."
  - ralferoo 2y ago
    It's just Stockholm syndrome...
- superkuh 2y ago
  OAuth 2 is definitely a "technology" and not a program. It is a tool for large corporations to create proprietary incompatible "OAuth" implementations. Whereas OAuth (1) was actually a program and it did what it said and was compatible. OAuth 2 is terrible corporate crapware. It is "open"auth like "open"ai is open. As for LANs, my home LAN is still going strong, no flakey wireless for me. My childhood friends group did stop having in-person LAN parties around 2009; mostly because we all moved to different regions. We still do occasionally set up a VPN to play some old non-internet game but it's mostly over the internet now (with self-hosted voice chat).
  - DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
    > It is "open"auth like "open"ai is open. OAuth2 and OIDC are fully open specifications: anyone can join a working-group (there's no membership gatekeeping); and they both have plenty of fully open-source implementations. Not like OpenAI at all.
    - 2y ago
contingencies 2y ago
IPX broadcast talk was fun. Forget the command. '90s Hong Kong! Anyone remember that warez market in Mongkok?
- ahar083 2y ago
  I remember heading to HK on a high school trip and we all ended up in that building, many people grabbing loads of CDs. Felt like Christmas! (I was too worried about customs in my home country checking my bags on arrival though!)
- ralferoo 2y ago
  I suspect you're thinking of upstairs in the Golden computer arcade in ShamShuiPo. It's still there, but it was already "cleaned up" and respectable when I went back in 1999, having shifted focus almost entirely to business needs. I went back again a few years ago, and maybe it's just because I'm older or maybe it's because I've discovered HQB in Shenzhen, but it feels really boring now. You can at least still find the latest half-a-billion-in-one NES emulators downstairs, so that's always a good thing. When I went in 1992, it was crazy. CDs didn't have much adoption for computers by then, so the market was still floppies - IIRC HK$10 per disk and another HK$10 for a photocopied manual. They'd take your money and phone up some guy and tell them the four digit code and 10 minutes later someone would hand you a stack of disks. It felt weird that it was so blatant, but the first time I went by myself, I couldn't find it and asked a policeman for directions. He said in English, "Oh, the copied stuff? Over there!" and pointed to it! That said, I only ever bought 3 disks from there - partly because I didn't have much money, but mostly because I found the programming books downstairs even more interesting. They were translations of all the English programming books, for about HK$30 each. The text may have been all Chinese, but the source code wasn't, so I bought a couple of books just for the diagrams and the source code.
  - contingencies 2y ago
    Cool that it's still there. I sort of recall visiting in '0-something and being disappointed. For a long time there was a larger spiritual successor in Bangkok, Pratunam Mall, but I'm pretty sure that's also scaled down these days. In some ways I guess they were the cultural equivalent of record shops. Probably many former soviet countries had them too.
blueflow 2y ago
I don't get it. Is it gone? The author doesn't tell what happened since then. Aside from newer machines and modern software, things in the LAN haven't changed much, right?
- neilalexander 2y ago
  Of course it’s not gone, although I suspect there’s a very large number of people who would be surprised to learn either that their Wi-Fi network at home is actually a LAN or that a LAN has utility outside of just providing access to the Internet.
  - mock-possum 2y ago
    Yeah that was my first thought seeing the title - what ‘remembering,’ I’m on a LAN right now, it’s nothing special.
    - foobarian 2y ago
      The meaning probably includes having at least a few computers talking to each other at home, instead of the sad clone army of NATed web browsers.
    - unethical_ban 2y ago
      My thoughts after reading the article is that the author compares learning networks and computers isolated on a LAN vs. in the modern world of connected SaaS and the like. That the subject matter is different, less exciting. It's like comparing a company in its startup phase to its soulless corporate behemoth phase. And, it's a tailscale blog so it segues to their business.
cat_plus_plus 2y ago
Huh? I am using it rather than remembering it. Since my router only allows specific hosts and ports to be accessed from Internet, there is no need for security between my laptop and my 3D printer, can just upload and print the model / watch it on camera by typing a URL.
- tcdent 2y ago
  You are using the Internet. He is speaking in reference to applications which are hosted and used locally (Local Area Network). Your 3D printer, assuming it truly doesn't need an Internet connection to function, is an anomaly today. Remotely hosted assets, data & logic have become the norm.
kemotep 2y ago
> Could a part-time programmer like my father write small-business software today? Could he make it as safe and productive as our LAN was? Maybe. If he was canny, and stuck to old-fashioned desktops of the 90s and physically isolated the machines from the internet. But there is no chance you could get the records onto a modern phone safely (or even legally under HIPAA) with the hours my father gave the project. Their father’s software likely was not HIPAA compliant or safe, just isolated. They speak earlier in the post about it being a permission-less file based database any computer could access, including his personal one. And that any innocuous command could potentially bring the whole thing down. Certainly looking back with rose colored glasses to the situation. It probably did work great for his father’s needs but “safe and compliant with modern medical data protection laws” is was not. I do think that a simpler approach to small business software like this example is not a bad goal. This was a great read. Thank you for sharing.
l7l 2y ago
Nice read. Love how it evoked the memories from the golden days where everything was exciting, new and fun :)
eddieroger 2y ago
I know that this article was basically an ad for Tailscale, which happens to be a product I've really grown to love, but it still struck a chord in me. I share the yearning for the "good old days" when we could just do stuff on the Internet and it felt limitless. The spirit of build over buy felt different then, too. While I don't have a parent who wrote practice management software, I remember a particular niche music store we'd go to using Fox Pro to manage their inventory and catalog. I wish I saw more of that today. As it happens, I was thinking of whipping up a Rails app to help my wife with a particular task she's got, and it occurred to me I can host it in our basement if I install Tailscale on her phone and computer, and it will just work, particularly if they can get identity integrated beyond joining a tailnet. So maybe the author's point is valid but overstated, and it still exists somewhat, just less often.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- crawshaw 2y ago
  Author here. I realize it reads as an ad for Tailscale, but I actually wrote it earlier in 2019 while doing some of the very early product development. In a sense it is more a PRD than anything.
  - eddieroger 2y ago
    Well, my apologies. It was a very enjoyable read. Keep doing what you're doing! And thank you all for being cool to headscale - I would love more family-as-enterprise pricing, and am thankful that headscale is developed and exists.
TheMagicHorsey 2y ago
I remember those days. I feel the same way as the author. But I think the right place to find that same joy in programming today, is by building stuff with embedded systems. You can do a lot of fun stuff as a kid with an arduino, some components, and instructions from the Internet.
ehPReth 2y ago
is there a way to give a 'tailscale IP address' to dumber devices on your network? effectively serving 'tailnet addresses' via DHCP? say to a printer, other lower powered devices, etc. could have sworn i saw an article about this at some point but can't find it
- dopylitty 2y ago
  I think you're looking for the Tailscale subnet router[0] 0: https://tailscale.com/kb/1019/subnets https://tailscale.com/kb/1019/subnets
- keyworkorange 2y ago
  Maybe you're thinking of subnet relays? https://tailscale.com/kb/1019/subnets https://tailscale.com/kb/1019/subnets
johnnyballgame 2y ago
Brought back frightening memories of running a 10BASE2 network on LANtastic. Any one bad connection and the whole network came down. So much fun to troubleshoot.
zwieback 2y ago
I must be the same age, remember Netware and also LANtastic and others. I worked on a product that let Macs running AppleTalk connect to PC LANs.

180 points by udev4096 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Nice write up, took me back to running LANded NT in the same neck of the woods as the author up in Darwin :) Small world!

croon 2y ago

I started reading it out of remembrance of the LANs I went to in the 90s, but kept reading because of the experience of core logic having much less overhead then very much mirroring my own. Good writing and astute observations.

sgarland 2y ago

I also fondly remember IPX from when I was a kid. Red Alert 2 and Age of Empires II supported it, and it was truly zero-config on a small LAN. Then, eventually it died off, and I had to learn TCP. The author’s point about so much not being necessary today, while simultaneously having more drudge work is interesting. I’ve often thought the former, but hadn’t connected it to the latter. For example, I commandeered my family’s two PCs (a Celeron 333 MHz and a Pentium III 550 MHz – what a screamer!) at night to run distcc on, so that Gentoo builds would finish in a somewhat reasonable amount of time. This is simply not necessary anymore. Firefox, which used to be an overnight job, now compiles in 10-20 minutes for most modern CPUs. On the one hand, this is wonderful – faster feedback loops, more time to tinker. On the other hand, getting distcc set up back then was a fairly large undertaking for a kid, and taught you a good deal about a wide range of topics. Also, since the pain level of failure was so high, you were more careful to get it right the first time, lest you awaken to disappointment.

tshaddox 2y ago
> I also fondly remember IPX from when I was a kid. Red Alert 2 and Age of Empires II supported it, and it was truly zero-config on a small LAN. Interestingly, I recall Red Alert 2 only supporting IPX, and that causing tons of trouble for us at one LAN party when we tried to play it. Of course I may be remembering this wrong due to the passage of time and the fact that my technical skills were rudimentary at the time.
- nortonsdad 2y ago
  I can't comment on Red Alert 2 in particular, but many early network multiplayer games predate widespread adoption of the internet so TCP/IP wasn't an option. Early online gaming services like Kali were almost a product built around a TCP/IP wrapper for IPX that allowed internet multiplayer on a platform it wasn't initially designed for. But it wasn't long before most people probably didn't even have the IPX protocol installed anymore.
- swozey 2y ago
  Yeah I had basically the same system (Celeron 300a overclocked to a blazing 504mhz) and trying to play the same games with my dad over IPX was a huge problem. I don't remember why, just frustration and never wanting to use ipx. Definitely had problems with one of the Warcrafts, I assume 1 but maybe 2
  - cyberax 2y ago
    If you used pure DOS with a network driver, it JustWorked(tm)(r)(c). However, Windows 95 had its own implementation of IPX, and it sometimes had issues.
  - Aqua_Geek 2y ago
    Warcraft 2 definitely used IPX for multiplayer. I remember struggling to get an IPX driver installed on our family computers so we could play.
- IntelMiner 2y ago
  Red Alert 2 in retrospect feels like an absolute "perfect storm" of bad luck that still produced a fantastic game RA2 runs on the same engine as Tiberian Sun (with minor modifications) Tiberian Sun was Westwood's first engine in C++ It was also two years behind schedule and pushed out barely functional after EA bought Westwood out in the late 1990's While Westwood was busy putting itself back together under EA they spun off "Westwood Pacific" and tasked them to make Red Alert 2 using this same engine Red Alert 2's engine is the most cantankerous, buggy piece of junk that ran what I would strongly argue was the pinnacle of the RTS genre. Getting it running on modern systems is an exercise in "what directdraw wrapper actually works?" and hoping that the UDP patch doesn't cause random game desyncs, even on a modern LAN
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
MisterTea 2y ago
> I also fondly remember IPX from when I was a kid. IPX is the network layer and SPX was the transport layer on top. IPX can be used directly like UDP or the SPX protocol used when you need a guaranteed in-order byte pipe like TCP. Uses the MAC address as the machine address and was pretty light weight to the point where it out-performed IP in some cases. As a silly hobby project I want to take a stab at writing a user space IPX/SPX stack on Plan 9 and model it after ip(3). The stack would mount itself after /net providing /net/ipx and /net/spx, then you bind it to one or more Ethernet adapters. Programs wanting to listen or dial on IPX or SPX just put ipx!address!service instead of tcp!address!port for their dial strings. Then you could easily build IPX networks again and even easily tunnel them over whatever using 9P by mounting the stack on other machines.
- sgarland 2y ago
  Ahhh, right. Networking is the area of tech where I learned enough to do what I needed, and then stopped. I keep meaning to get better at it. Your proposed project sounds like a fun way to do so!
bombcar 2y ago
distcc (for Gentoo!) still makes sense when you have some beast machines and a bunch of Raspberry Pis or similar.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

drpossum 2y ago

> Learning how to store passwords or add OAuth2 to your toy web site is not fun Hard disagree. OAuth2 is a neat technology and every personal thunk you run across or find yourself asking "why the heck do I need to do this? why can't I just do x?) trying to implement it is an important part of security and instructive on how to build a secure system where you can only trust components to do a minimal thing. Storing passwords (or really salted password hashes) is similar.

jagged-chisel 2y ago
You have not convinced me this is "fun."
- ralferoo 2y ago
  It's just Stockholm syndrome...
superkuh 2y ago
OAuth 2 is definitely a "technology" and not a program. It is a tool for large corporations to create proprietary incompatible "OAuth" implementations. Whereas OAuth (1) was actually a program and it did what it said and was compatible. OAuth 2 is terrible corporate crapware. It is "open"auth like "open"ai is open. As for LANs, my home LAN is still going strong, no flakey wireless for me. My childhood friends group did stop having in-person LAN parties around 2009; mostly because we all moved to different regions. We still do occasionally set up a VPN to play some old non-internet game but it's mostly over the internet now (with self-hosted voice chat).
- DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
  > It is "open"auth like "open"ai is open. OAuth2 and OIDC are fully open specifications: anyone can join a working-group (there's no membership gatekeeping); and they both have plenty of fully open-source implementations. Not like OpenAI at all.
  - 2y ago

contingencies 2y ago

IPX broadcast talk was fun. Forget the command. '90s Hong Kong! Anyone remember that warez market in Mongkok?

ahar083 2y ago
I remember heading to HK on a high school trip and we all ended up in that building, many people grabbing loads of CDs. Felt like Christmas! (I was too worried about customs in my home country checking my bags on arrival though!)
ralferoo 2y ago
I suspect you're thinking of upstairs in the Golden computer arcade in ShamShuiPo. It's still there, but it was already "cleaned up" and respectable when I went back in 1999, having shifted focus almost entirely to business needs. I went back again a few years ago, and maybe it's just because I'm older or maybe it's because I've discovered HQB in Shenzhen, but it feels really boring now. You can at least still find the latest half-a-billion-in-one NES emulators downstairs, so that's always a good thing. When I went in 1992, it was crazy. CDs didn't have much adoption for computers by then, so the market was still floppies - IIRC HK$10 per disk and another HK$10 for a photocopied manual. They'd take your money and phone up some guy and tell them the four digit code and 10 minutes later someone would hand you a stack of disks. It felt weird that it was so blatant, but the first time I went by myself, I couldn't find it and asked a policeman for directions. He said in English, "Oh, the copied stuff? Over there!" and pointed to it! That said, I only ever bought 3 disks from there - partly because I didn't have much money, but mostly because I found the programming books downstairs even more interesting. They were translations of all the English programming books, for about HK$30 each. The text may have been all Chinese, but the source code wasn't, so I bought a couple of books just for the diagrams and the source code.
- contingencies 2y ago
  Cool that it's still there. I sort of recall visiting in '0-something and being disappointed. For a long time there was a larger spiritual successor in Bangkok, Pratunam Mall, but I'm pretty sure that's also scaled down these days. In some ways I guess they were the cultural equivalent of record shops. Probably many former soviet countries had them too.

blueflow 2y ago

I don't get it. Is it gone? The author doesn't tell what happened since then. Aside from newer machines and modern software, things in the LAN haven't changed much, right?

neilalexander 2y ago
Of course it’s not gone, although I suspect there’s a very large number of people who would be surprised to learn either that their Wi-Fi network at home is actually a LAN or that a LAN has utility outside of just providing access to the Internet.
- mock-possum 2y ago
  Yeah that was my first thought seeing the title - what ‘remembering,’ I’m on a LAN right now, it’s nothing special.
  - foobarian 2y ago
    The meaning probably includes having at least a few computers talking to each other at home, instead of the sad clone army of NATed web browsers.
  - unethical_ban 2y ago
    My thoughts after reading the article is that the author compares learning networks and computers isolated on a LAN vs. in the modern world of connected SaaS and the like. That the subject matter is different, less exciting. It's like comparing a company in its startup phase to its soulless corporate behemoth phase. And, it's a tailscale blog so it segues to their business.

cat_plus_plus 2y ago

Huh? I am using it rather than remembering it. Since my router only allows specific hosts and ports to be accessed from Internet, there is no need for security between my laptop and my 3D printer, can just upload and print the model / watch it on camera by typing a URL.

tcdent 2y ago
You are using the Internet. He is speaking in reference to applications which are hosted and used locally (Local Area Network). Your 3D printer, assuming it truly doesn't need an Internet connection to function, is an anomaly today. Remotely hosted assets, data & logic have become the norm.

kemotep 2y ago

> Could a part-time programmer like my father write small-business software today? Could he make it as safe and productive as our LAN was? Maybe. If he was canny, and stuck to old-fashioned desktops of the 90s and physically isolated the machines from the internet. But there is no chance you could get the records onto a modern phone safely (or even legally under HIPAA) with the hours my father gave the project. Their father’s software likely was not HIPAA compliant or safe, just isolated. They speak earlier in the post about it being a permission-less file based database any computer could access, including his personal one. And that any innocuous command could potentially bring the whole thing down. Certainly looking back with rose colored glasses to the situation. It probably did work great for his father’s needs but “safe and compliant with modern medical data protection laws” is was not. I do think that a simpler approach to small business software like this example is not a bad goal. This was a great read. Thank you for sharing.

l7l 2y ago

Nice read. Love how it evoked the memories from the golden days where everything was exciting, new and fun :)

eddieroger 2y ago

I know that this article was basically an ad for Tailscale, which happens to be a product I've really grown to love, but it still struck a chord in me. I share the yearning for the "good old days" when we could just do stuff on the Internet and it felt limitless. The spirit of build over buy felt different then, too. While I don't have a parent who wrote practice management software, I remember a particular niche music store we'd go to using Fox Pro to manage their inventory and catalog. I wish I saw more of that today. As it happens, I was thinking of whipping up a Rails app to help my wife with a particular task she's got, and it occurred to me I can host it in our basement if I install Tailscale on her phone and computer, and it will just work, particularly if they can get identity integrated beyond joining a tailnet. So maybe the author's point is valid but overstated, and it still exists somewhat, just less often.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
crawshaw 2y ago
Author here. I realize it reads as an ad for Tailscale, but I actually wrote it earlier in 2019 while doing some of the very early product development. In a sense it is more a PRD than anything.
- eddieroger 2y ago
  Well, my apologies. It was a very enjoyable read. Keep doing what you're doing! And thank you all for being cool to headscale - I would love more family-as-enterprise pricing, and am thankful that headscale is developed and exists.

TheMagicHorsey 2y ago

I remember those days. I feel the same way as the author. But I think the right place to find that same joy in programming today, is by building stuff with embedded systems. You can do a lot of fun stuff as a kid with an arduino, some components, and instructions from the Internet.

ehPReth 2y ago

is there a way to give a 'tailscale IP address' to dumber devices on your network? effectively serving 'tailnet addresses' via DHCP? say to a printer, other lower powered devices, etc. could have sworn i saw an article about this at some point but can't find it

dopylitty 2y ago
I think you're looking for the Tailscale subnet router[0] 0: https://tailscale.com/kb/1019/subnets https://tailscale.com/kb/1019/subnets
keyworkorange 2y ago
Maybe you're thinking of subnet relays? https://tailscale.com/kb/1019/subnets https://tailscale.com/kb/1019/subnets

johnnyballgame 2y ago

Brought back frightening memories of running a 10BASE2 network on LANtastic. Any one bad connection and the whole network came down. So much fun to troubleshoot.

zwieback 2y ago

I must be the same age, remember Netware and also LANtastic and others. I worked on a product that let Macs running AppleTalk connect to PC LANs.