I've been running it the last year or two to get e-mail to a vintage DOS BBS that had a UUCP package. I was pleasantly surprised it was out of the box usable on both CentOS and Debian, and Postfix still ships with example UUCP email config.
The key is to use a non-compressed codec such as G.711u/a-law, and disable echo and silence suppression. I can regularly get 28.8k-33.6k carrier speeds across the US when using an ITSP/VoIP provider and my modems connected to Grandstream/Linksys/Cisco analog telephone adapters.
There's a certain subculture who enjoys connecting machines to the modern internet which have absolutely no business being on the modern internet, and thus only have modems.
Dreamcast Quake 2 matches were one of the most popular uses last I checked
I used the acme-dns server (https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns) for this. It's basically a mini DNS server with a very basic API backed with sqlite. All of my acme.sh instances talk to it to publish TXT records, and accepts queries from the internet for those TXT records.
There's a NS record so *.acme-dns.example.com delegates requests to it, so each of my hosts that need a cert have a public CNAME like _acme-challenge.www.example.com CNAME asdfasf.acme-dns.example.com which points back to the acme-dns server.
When setting up a new hostname/certificate, a REST request is sent to acme-dns to register a new username/password/subdomain which is fed to acme.sh. Then every time acme.sh needs to issue/renew the certificate it sends the TXT info to the internal acme-dns server, which in turn makes it available to the world.
Back in the ISP days of the 90s, if you used the Microsoft Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) and wanted to distribute customized versions of IE to your customers, one of the requirements was to use IE-only elements on your main website to promote usage of IE. Marquee was one of the least obnoxious ways to do that compared to other options.
Qmodem was my favorite comm program during the BBS days, and it still is today when working with vintage computers. It was just nice to use. Its scripting language was the first I used and I find myself wishing there was a Linux comm program with scripting that worked that well. Long distance calls were expensive so I used a Qmodem script to call BBSs each morning to download my email before school.
Just the last several months I've been using Qmodem scripting to make thousands of modem calls over VoIP to test downloads to see which models and ATAs work best.
After I jumped back into the vintage BBS world I've been keeping an eye out for anything Qmodem. I recently just picked up a Qmodem manual on ebay that I wanted to scan and archive, because it's pretty rare to see.
Not too long ago I saw where John had posted to a FB group he was working on a new DOS version of Qmodem, my first interaction with him. I was excited to see it be worked on again and hoped to see the new version. Sad to see him go.
> Just the last several months I've been using Qmodem scripting to make thousands of modem calls over VoIP to test downloads to see which models and ATAs work best.
This is great. That someone is still using this software meaningfully to this day.-
Do you plan on writing about your dip back into vintage BBSs? I have a lot of memories from my youth oriented around BBSs, a world and network of communities I wasn’t really old enough to understand. I’d like to revisit that time with my adult brain…
These were pretty decent, not too terrible, and could be set up to dial normal ISPs. They filled a niche with older customers and/those who had zero computer experience but wanted to check email and browse web pages back in the 90s. They didn't last long enough to bridge the gap to the tablet era, so I'm guessing a lot of people finally had to learn a computer.
I do remember playing some MIDI files on it and realizing how good it sounded compared to my basic SoundBlaster 16, which made me go out and get a SB AWE32.
They could also be reconfigured, via a specially crafted email, if I recall correctly, to call 911. A huge proportion of these boxes were in a handful of zip codes in Florida, and once the exploit started spreading, a few PSAPs got hosed until a fix could be developed
I'm surprised there's no mention of QBasic that shipped with MS-DOS >= 5.0. This was built on top of EDIT.COM, and while it only ran a BASIC interpreter instead of compiling an executable like full-blown QuickBasic.
IIRC it had a rather extensive help lookup system for functions, data types, reference tables, error codes, and whatnot. You could step through your program, set debug points, all without exiting to DOS. It was my first ever exposure to an IDE, I thought it was pretty nice for what it was.
I loved QBasic. That integrated help system also came with extensive sample code for each function, including some full programs. Copying and modifying those was a huge boost to learning how to program.
Traffic to vs through a router; both UDP and ICMP probes to a given hop will both go to the control plane which can be rate limited or handled by a general purpose CPU.
Probes to hops beyond will virtually always go through the fast data plane.
