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Summary
The BarnNet was originally created so that the individual computers -- a Power Macintosh, a Pentium, and a pair of 486s -- that we brought to the Barn in 1996 wouldn't have to fight over our single phone line. By the time we left in 1999, we had a dedicated router on a separate phone line, one Ethernet hub per floor, and had seen as many as eight simultaneously active computers.
The current list at the end (5/99) was:
Waiting in the wings but never (or only rarely) connected were:
Details
We wanted to use an Internet router to connect our local network with the Dartmouth IP network, so that we could all share a single continuous dial-up connection. The original plan was to use a cheap PC as a router, but we'd also considered using an old Sun 3/50 workstation instead, or Fred's Pentium PC under Linux. Our campus's dialup people told us they no longer assign static IPs in their subnet, and they're not in the same subnet as our department (which probably would), so we couldn't easily route through there...
We're now set up with IP masquerading (Network Address Translation) through a Mac package called IPNetRouter running on the Power Mac 7200. That allows us to dial into Kiewit using normal PPP software and then share the connection transparently over our local Ethernet. Our remaining problem is that modems are slow (limited to 28.8/33.6 with the Barn's crappy phone lines) and we don't have any good alternatives like cable modems and DSL in our area.
The History
These are the actual journal entries that were made to document the progress of our network on the Barn Web page. Our progress was erratic at times, but by the end we made a fine network environment for ourselves (and had a lot of fun figuring things out).
September 5, 1996A local area network (802.3 Ethernet) now connects the three computers in our house. It hasn't been used for anything yet, but we all like to gather and look at the hub activity lights now and then, just to check for signs of spontaneous communication.
September 17, 1996Nope, we haven't tested it yet. Test 1.0 is set for whenever we download Marathon 2 demos.
October 2, 1996OK, we figured out that one of our cables was bad. I guess it wasn't such a great idea to force it through the hole through the ceiling before we were sure it had been drilled wide enough...
October 9, 1996Yay, we have IP connectivity, except that we had to bring in another (temporary) computer to establish it. It seems like OpenTransport 1.1.1b6 on the Power Mac 7200 may be the culprit. Using the borrowed Mac, we've been able to get files between the PowerMac and the Win95 computer. The OS/2 computer in our house still doesn't have the right network drivers.
October 17, 1996Turns out that DirectX from Microsoft is a real pain to get installed right. We're still trying on that Marathon 2 test.
November 12, 1996The problem with my computer eventually turned out to be a hardware defect: because it was an early model manufactured without an independent oscillator to clock the Ethernet port, it locked up after 32 kB of data transfer. (There's an Apple tech note [web page no longer exists] that documents the problem in fuzzy terms.) TCP/IP services are now working fine... on two computers. We've had problems getting the OS/2 computer in our house configured, and there are two new computers that we'll need to add soon.
November 15, 1996I think we'll need more hard drive space before we can try the Marathon 2 test. We've settled for FTP as a test for now.
November 27, 1996We welcomed our newest resident, Fred's new Pentium machine running Linux and attempting to run Windows 95. Eventually this might be our router. We discovered that Marathon 2 doesn't network cross-platform, grrr.
December 1, 1996Our new resident is functional except for conflicts between its modem and mouse. For a while, it had the amusing restriction of only being able to send and receive data on the modem when the mouse was being moved... very tiring for the user. We've successfully improved that to a situation where neither works.
December 10, 1996 - January 5, 1997The BarnNet was deactivated while everyone took their computers home. We reconnected everything on January 5-7, and are working on getting the last (for our 5 port hub) computer equipped with the necessary hardware and software to hook up.
February 8, 1997Well, we've solved the multiple emailers problem... sort of. Using the Linux machine on our network as a dialup machine, we can telnet on our LAN to get to it and then open up remote sessions anywhere on the Internet. Unfortunately we can't use other TCP/IP services, but that'd probably overload our little 33.6 kbps link anyway...
February 19, 1997A room change has altered our network topology. The MacOS 7200 computer is now on the same floor as the Linux/Windows95 computers, but it's actually a little further away from the hub as a result. A few more holes are going to have to be drilled in our walls -- as a temporary measure we string a cable across the stairway when we want to connect the Mac up.
February 21, 1997Thanks to a borrowed high-speed drill, we've now got the Mac connected through the walls.
July 26, 1997We've now added an old DEC VT1200 X terminal to our house. Unfortunately, it's not so easy to add to the network: it uses BNC (thinnet) as opposed to our existing 10baseT machines. A new 10baseT hub with a BNC connector would solve the problem...
August 3, 1997We gave up on that X terminal.
February 6, 1998We've now installed a second phone line in our house. Things didn't quite go smoothly at first; we used the phone cable that PrimeStar had installed, and that turned out to be faulty (which it seems was why it had gone unused). Disconnecting the first line on that cable seemed to fix the problem, though. We may be able to add a new computer as a software router (we've looked recently at inexpensive configurations based on old 68030 Macs, one of which we can probably borrow from our department).
May 11, 1998We're upgrading from a 5 port to an 8 port 10bT hub... wheee! We don't even have five devices, of course, but the big advantage of the new hub will be the BNC port it has -- that will make that old X terminal from last summer usable (as usable as it can be).
May 19, 1998The new hub is in. The X terminal, despite periodic complaints about its Ethernet interface, seems to be working fine.
June 1, 1998Jamie's new G3 Mac is in, and BJ's old 486 is out. We now have a G3 PowerMac, a PowerMac 7200, and a Pentium Pro on the network, plus of course the X terminal.
June 20, 1998We used the older 7200/90 PowerMac as a router using a demo version of a package called IPNetRouter. It's been a little flaky, and it seems to get its version number updated about twice a week, but it does work. It's pretty cool finally being able to share a dialup connection.
June 29, 1998We gained a new housemate, and a new computer -- a Pentium II. Unfortunately it doesn't yet have an Ethernet card, but one will be ordered soon.
July 6, 1998We went ahead and bought a license for IPNetRouter when the 21-day trial ran out. It was only $45 with an academic discount, and it seems to have stabilized into a trouble-free version.
July 17, 1998After over a week on backorder, the Pentium II's Ethernet card is still not here. Maybe we can reorder a different brand.
August 2, 1998Well, the Ethernet card finally arrived, and the network is now 5 strong.
September 4, 1998We had our first large-scale network game, a 4-player game of Myth. Technically we could do some games with 5 machines, but sadly we're lacking players.
September 6, 1998We added a color inkjet printer to the mix this past week. The printer is hooked up to Fred's Pentium, which henceforth will run in linux while unattended, and emulates a PostScript laser printer for the other computers on the network. It's still a little flaky sometimes, but still very nice.
September 9, 1998In order to alleviate some of the traffic congestion from multiple Web browsers over one 28.8 kbps connection, we've installed a copy of the Squid proxy cache server on the linux machine. All the computers in the house now use that machine as their proxy and share a single cache, giving us better performance and some interesting Web access stats to peruse. Initially the server is running at about a 25% hit rate, and reducing Web access times by an average of about 15%.
December 28 - March 14, 1999In December we made the decision to switch the router over to a dedicated 68K Mac (a Quadra 700), since that way the router wouldn't get interfered with and we could play local net games on the 7200 without killing the connection. In a word, this sucked. The 68K version of IPNetRouter was horribly unstable, and we'd have to restart the computer at least once a day when it hung. This week we went back to the 7200 and haven't had any problems since. We also got rid of the printer, which was heavily used but never 100% stable. A real network printer (instead of a serial printer shared with linux) might have helped. Maybe we wouldn't have done better without a $1000 laser printer, though.
May 15, 1999Our lease ends June 15, so this will be the end of the BarnNet. One last thing we've done to upgrade the network is to install a second cache, the "Internet Junkbuster" as a front end to our proxy cache server. The Junkbuster does a fine job of stripping out a lot of banner ads, and over the past week our cache hit rate has edged up from 40% to 45%. Unfortunately we haven't had complete cooperation from some of our newer housemates in using the cache server this past year, but for the rest of us it's been reducing Web access times by 30% on average.