Livingston Enterprises

» see livingston.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Livingston Enterprises was a father and son. Ronald and Steve Willens started it in 1986 in Pleasanton, California, selling hardware to people whose problem was getting a large number of serial ports onto one machine. The PortMaster Communications Server shipped in 1990, roughly eighteen months before the market it was built for existed in any size worth measuring.

Then Merit Network put out a request for proposals in 1991. Merit ran MichNet and a substantial piece of NSFNET, and it had a problem that was about to become everybody's problem. People were dialing in from all over Michigan, and there was no standard way for the box that answered the phone to ask a central server whether a given username and password were any good. Every vendor had its own scheme and none of them talked to each other. Livingston answered the RFP and won it.

Carl Rigney and Steve Willens wrote the code. What they wrote was called Remote Authentication Dial In User Service, and the first RADIUS-authenticated access server went live on Merit's network in 1993, letting people across Michigan dial in and reach NSFNET. Willens and Rigney took it to the IETF as an Internet Draft in April 1994. It was published as RFC 2058 in January 1997, with the two Livingston names on the header block alongside Allan Rubens of Merit and William Simpson. A company with ninety employees wrote a protocol and then gave the specification away.

The business underneath it was enormous relative to its size. By 1996 Livingston gear sat in about 2,200 ISPs worldwide and held sixty-seven percent of the ISP remote-access market by one Infonetics count. It was one of the last independents left in a category that Ascend Communications and Cisco were both pouring money into. The company had filed with the SEC to go public. Then Lucent made an offer.

~ the dossier ~

~ the day it died ~

Lucent announced the deal on 15 October 1997: approximately 650 million dollars in Lucent stock, with completion expected before the end of December. It completed. Steve Willens stayed on to run the division from Pleasanton and Livingston's boxes picked up Lucent's K56flex modem cards. The PortMaster 4 went out under Lucent's name, pointed at telephone companies and cable operators rather than at the small ISPs that had built the company.

The logic was the same logic driving every acquisition Lucent made that year. Ascend held the other half of this market with Cisco circling both of them, and buying was faster than building. What Lucent actually got was a customer list and a product line in a category that had maybe four good years left in it. Dial-up stopped being a growth business and the PortMaster name thinned out of the catalog. Nobody issued a statement about it.

~ what replaced it ~

RADIUS went the other way entirely. RFC 2058 was obsoleted by RFC 2138 within the same year it was published, then by RFC 2865 in June 2000. That last one is still the document in force. FreeRADIUS, the open-source implementation that carries most of the real traffic, has been under development since 1999 and kept its configuration syntax close enough to Livingston's original that an administrator from 1996 could sit down and read it.

The protocol outgrew its brief by an absurd margin. It was designed so a modem bank in Ann Arbor could ask a server in the next room about a username. It now stands behind enterprise wireless networks and VPN logins. Cellular carriers authenticate against it too.

I have been typing a username and a password into Turkish networks since 1998, starting on a 33.6k modem dialing a local ISP and arriving, in 2026, at badging onto a corporate wireless network in Ankara. Both ends of that span ran on RADIUS. The company that wrote it stopped existing in December 1997, which is to say it was already gone before I made my first connection, and I have spent twenty-eight years being authenticated by software from a dead company without ever having a reason to learn its name. Most of what still works was built by people who are no longer around to take credit for it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »