Michael Was Here

This is the third year I have stood up SneakyNet, my fake telephone company at the Southwest Vintage Computer Festival. SneakyNet supplies dial-tone and IP transit to exhibitors around the show, and does so with a mix of period correct and modern hardware. I thought it would be fun to take a step back and talk about how this whole network is put together, and how things actually work.

Before we dive too deeply, more documentation than you could ever want can be found on the main SneakyNet docs site: https://docs.sneaky.nonroutable.network/.

First off, lets start with the Vintage Computer Festival itself. This event is an open-to-the-public exposition of technology, collections, and integrated swap meet of all things old tech. There’s hardware ranging from old Apple computers to a myriad of early windows machines, old terminal services clusters and groovy 70s terminals to use them with, and of course, a smattering of telephones on any free table spaces.

Why Do I Do This?

I think its fun to bring in the telephone infrastructure. It connects things together in ways that many other exhibitors are not really resourced to do, and providing connectivity has always been something I’m fascinated by. The concept of action at a distance really draws me in, and the idea of a private telephone network is very cool.

Since I’m already dropping thousands of feet of cable for telephony, its not a huge stretch to then drop a few thousand more feet of cable to turn up wifi and make modern devices able to connect as well. This year we also dropped Ethernet to tables that requested it, but I think in the future we’ll heavily restrict Ethernet based on high request rate and low utilization rate. Its a lot of work to pull cable that isn’t used.

How Do I Do This?

Planning for the show starts about 4 months prior with the initial venue walks, table plans, and nailing down what I want to exhibit. This year I had 5 main things I wanted to work on to improve my exhibit at the show:

Terminal Services - I had bought a Cisco AS5300 with MICA modem card last year, but didn’t get around to doing anything with it. I wanted to have a terminal services system that people could dial into in order to access information resources anachronistic to the era of the requesting machine. There’s something fun about calling up a search engine from a vt100.
Better Provisioning - In years past, its been difficult to farm out work to people who want to help me, because the network is big, complicated, and relies on a lot of deep domain specific knowledge to setup and operate. This year I wanted to focus on breaking down the setup components into things that other people could help with and make work, so that it wasn’t all riding on my shoulders to make it happen.
Full Day 0 Setup - Dropping all the cable, setting up everything on the floor, and testing the network is fairly disruptive to exhibitors loading in. I wanted to have all of this done before the exhibitors were in the building so that they’d walk in and their services would already be provisioned. I’m reasonably happy with how this went, but I should have done more work up-front to work out how long cables needed to be so they didn’t have to be fabricated on-site.
Billing - Last year at VCFMW I worked with the ShadyTel team to bring billing to their show. This runs on top of a very custom suite of software, and I wanted to polish and improve it for this show. The software worked well, but there are still a few things I want to work on which I’ll discuss more below.
Spellcheck - Last year mid way through the show I realized I had misspelled “Telecommunications” spelling it with only one ’m'. This wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t on my Polo’s, high-visibility vests, exhibitor name cards, and dozens of other places. Fortunately no-one seemed to notice as I suspect most people don’t know how to spell the word, but it was something I certainly wanted to fix this year. Unfortunately I did not meet a 100% success rate on this as in my service brochures ADSL became ASDL, but there’s always next year.

Custom Technology

By far the most complex and custom technology of the entire show is what started out as the billing engine, but is now an entire CRM with plant management features. This software which I’ve chosen to call MoneyPrinter2 is a full service multi-tenant aware service ordering, billing, and tracking suite that is hyper-specialized to the kinds of networks that happen at a vintage computer festival.

MoneyPrinter2 knows about every customer, the services they’ve ordered, and where to deliver those services. It can generate directories, work orders, and once usage information is ingested even billing printouts. Some of the next improvements I intend to make are to make statistics reporting faster and easier, and to improve the overall experience of managing the network.

MoneyPrinter2 is by far one of the more complex software suites I’ve worked on recently, but its complexity does a good job of highlighting the underlying complexity of the network it manages. The underlying network is based on technology ranging from the late 80s up to the current day, and this isn’t something that lends itself well to high layers of abstractions, so achieving the layers of abstractions that exist is already an achievement I’m proud of. There’s still work to do, but the system is more than functional today.

A Bit of Cosplay

I do intend the show in costume. I wear monogrammed polo shirts that bear the SneakyNet logo which is a cohesive design element across the entire network. I dress as an engineer would have in the early 2000s, and my demeanor is all about improving revenue for the company. Its a fun bit that fits well with the image that the phone company doesn’t necessarily care as much about delivering you the best service, only the most billable services.

This aspect is a lot of fun, and is something that’s even more fun at other shows where we have multiple different phone companies operating, because then you see everyone in their different shirts and vests. Maintaining the cohesive brand is also fun, as it draws people’s eyes away from the less thought out parts of the exhibit.

An example of this is the large ladder racking system I used to cross over an aisle so that no large-diameter cables were on the floor during the show. This worked extremely well even given the immense weight of the ladder sections. It did, however, have a significant visual presence, and so I slapped some SneakyNet plaques on it and referred to it throughout the show as the non-toll-free bridge, which always got at least a sensible chuckle from people when they heard it.

My Top 5

The show certainly wasn’t without some hiccups this year, but here are my top 5 from the weekend.

techav’s terminal servers. These hand-built terminal servers are really cool to look at, and provided a service another member of the show was dialed into. This was really cool to see and learn more about. These kinds of “service” exhibits are also just really cool to me.
Tandy Showcase - Always a fan favorite, I never get tired of seeing the incredible world of Tandy and the Radio Shack brand from my youth. Eddie maintains a very complete on-line presence at https://tandyshowcase.com so if you have fond memories of Radio Shack be sure to check it out.
Forgotten Machines - If you’ve gone to a vintage computing festival, you’ve met AJ Palmgren of Forgotten Machines. His high energy personality keeps everyone on their toes, and his selection of unique and rare machines is always a treat to look at. AJ’s energy truly knows no bounds, even performing an operatic closing to the show as we were loading out. I don’t know how this was possible, as my voice was completely shot by then, but my hat is off all the same.
Genericable always impresses me. This fully functioning cable headend shows the later generations of technology that would supplant the telephone system in the late nineties and early 2000s forcing further innovation. Their multiple weather stars made sure everyone knew that it is in fact hot in Texas, and that it was going to continue to be hot for the next several days. I’m always impressed with how knowledgeable and how kind the the team is, and I always walk away having learned something new.
Mid way through day 1, an exhibitor came running up to inform us that there was a second DHCP server somewhere on the exhibitor span that was handing out bad addresses. This led to a who-dunnit mystery of finding where the DHCP server was and isolating it from the rest of the network, though not before making a tongue-and-cheek announcement to the floor that people could avoid the shame of getting caught by checking their DHCP servers themselves. This certainly led to a a lot of people checking their equipment, and a morbid curiosity from the floor if we’d caught the culprit. In reality, we turned on DHCP snooping and set trust on the ports facing the real DHCP server, then called it a day. The culprit did eventually own up to is, revealing that they’d needed a switch, pulled some hardware from the free table, and only later realized that they’d plugged in a linksys home router to the network. Certainly an interesting afternoon, all things considered.

Looking to the Future

I’ll be next at VCF MidWest in the Chicago area, and then getting ready to start up planning and setup for VCFSW next year. Its a fun project, but a lot of work and effort. Something that I would like to keep doing long into the future.