[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Dngrsone

It was pretty simple, and considering the nature of our setup, it was kind of weird to have all this accounting and user control stuff for a mini that had only one terminal attached to it.

I have to assume the system could do enough to merit some form of job control, and that jobs might be submitted by different users, so some way of determining whose job it was was required.

I was amused by the way various assumptions were embedded in the IBM system. Earlier machines got fed jobs on punch cards, and you put a deck of cards into a card reader to load into the machine. Punch cards were largely gone when I got involved (though the data center did have a card reader). Instead, what was sent to the mainframe was a file of 80 column card images. I dealt with text files that were members of a partitioned data set, and created edited those files to make and submit jobs. The first cards in the deck were JCL statements to let the machine know it was a job, what its name was, what data sets it used, and what programs would be run as part of the job stream.

I also got more acquaintance than I wanted with error messages, and my experience was consistent. I'd get an error message, pull down the manual for a part of the system I was working with, go the the chapter governing the stuff I was using, and where I might expect an explanation of the error I encountered I'd find a reference to another manual I didn't ahve, no matter how many manuals I accumulated. (I never saw a complete set of manuals for an IBM 370 system.) VSAM errors were particular peeves. Next stop for me was Unix, and a complete set of manuals was three small sized binders occupying about a foot of space on the shelf. It was a revelation.

I later spent time in market research, and computing there began on mainframes. Data for market research projects was stored in IBM card/column format, and folks writing scripts in the specialized language implemented by the software had to plan where data was stored by card and columns. I did later encounter MR software that used an actual database as storage and could view it as you liked, but it wasn't the standard approach.

... well, actually, one of my coworkers had run wires out from his benches and set up his personal machine to act as a second terminal so he could monitor both benches from a back room, but back then (late '80s) that was akin to high sorcery. I know how he did it now, but I wasn't anything remotely network-savvy at the time, and yet I was one of only a few people who could write subroutines in JCL or (gasp) write a machine-language routine to be thumbed into the computer by hand.

An old friend once worked in a shop with two DEC PDP 1s. One was used for software development, and the other was used to play Spacewar. Someone decided only authorized users should be allowed to play Spacewar. So a programmer password protected the game, and told no one what it was. To play Spacewar, you had to go into the machine room, toggle front panel switches to put the system into single step debug mode, run Spacewar, step through the sequence till you got to where the password was input, figure out form what you saw what the password had to be, and enter it and play. If you were able to do that you were considered someone authorized to play Spacewar.

That's an interesting link, and may just work, though I am leery about double-NATting. Then again, that's essentially what VPN and TOR is, right?

Not really. I did something like that here previously.

What you essentially want to do is have the Motorola your access to the Uverse network, but have everything else done by a different system. So you put the Uverse into bridge mode, and all it does is serve as the gateway. Proving local IP addresses via DHCP, firewalling and the lake are done by another device, which gets a raw feed from the Motorala and sends stuff back out through it. You're taking the Motorola out of the loop as router, and having something else do it.

At one point, I was a Palm PDA connecting to my network. Everything else connected through WPA2 encryption, but the Palm only did WEP. I wasn't about to lower the security on my network, so I set up a second router configured as a bridge. It was seen as a trusted client by the main one. The PDA connected to the second modem, which forwarded the traffic through the master. DHCP, firewalling, and the like all happened on the main unit. When the PDA wasn't connected, the second unit was off. (I also turned on MAC address filtering on the second router so only the PDA could connect, and turned off SSID broadcast, to reduce likelihood of anyone in range seeing and connecting through it. I saw advice back when that if your security choices were WEP or none, use none so you wouldn't be under the illusion you were protected. )

... I could try it the "legal" way before going the questionable route. Hurts nothing and no one (well, except for the inevitable hue and cry that the internet is down until I finish the job).

The legal way I can see is used by the link I pointed to - put the Moto into bridge mode and have its functions performed by something else. I'd also look at getting a replacement modem. I'm not aware of anything special about Uverse that only the Motorola should work. This strikes me as AT&T being lazy and trying to reduce support issues. The question, if you found a compatible replacement, was whether they would even notice if you substituted.

I have Tor here, though I'm not playing with VPNs at the moment. Tor establishes an encrypted connection on a high port number to a Tor entry point, traffic is routed through multiple internal Tor network nodes, and proceeds to your destination from a Tor exit node. What the other ensd sees as your origin is the address of the Exit node, not yours. And your route through the internal Tor network changes periodically The intent is to make it impossible to trace your traffic back to you. In essence, Tor is an anonymous proxy with additional obfuscation in the proxy.

Thanks for the link!

You're welcome. Let us know how you make out.
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Dennis