I always give an ironic chuckle when fighting the print system on a unix machine(lpd, lp, cups...) the internal rant that goes with it is something like.
"Printing was THE original purpose, the reason for existence, of unix, you would think it would be a solved problem instead of the terrible mismatch of sins that it is."
I'm going from 30+ year old memories as an intern, but from what I remember:
Usually the RS232 was just on the terminal side. Somewhere along the path it got converted to twisted pair.
All the twisted pair serial lines congregated in the server room at a punch-down box. Eighteen year old me wasn't allowed to mess with anything past that point, but from what I can remember those lines were concentrated by a multiplexer (mux) and sent on to the minicomputer.
NASA's IT used to be split into the field centers and a central core IT organization. The field centers managed their own stuff, but anything agency-wide was handled by the core IT organization. Central IT also usually won out when there was a conflict.
When NASA combined their disparate field center mail systems into one (OneNASA
and later NOMAD) massive mail system in 2006-2008 they deployed everything that wasn't the squishy Exchange underbelly on SuSE Enterprise 10.
The field centers were very invested in RHEL. Mostly for scientific software and Oracle.
JPL has traditionally been separate from the rest of NASA and works with CalTech for their infrastructure.
There's a much larger than zero possibility something (network gear) North of this thing is black-holing ICMP echo and/or your ISP is dropping the responses.
Well, to be honest a whole lot has been done to FreeBSD network stack scalability quite recently (14-CURRENT), eg introduction of epoch(9) and the routing nexthop patches.
Otherwise it just sounds like another pointless and BS use-case from another rando AI company to keep the money taps flowing.
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