XPost: alt.comp.software.firefox   
   From: nospam@needed.invalid   
      
   On Mon, 12/22/2025 9:52 AM, Andy Burns wrote:   
   > Paul wrote:   
   >   
   >> Andy Burns wrote:   
   >> >> Daniel70 wrote:   
   >>>   
   >>>> I would have thought LAN was with-in a House, WAN was with-in a   
   (commercial) Building   
   >>>   
   >>> Within businesses, WAN usually refers to all their buildings (either   
   worldwide, or within a country).   
   >>   
   >> That's intranet.   
   >   
   > I understand why you suggest that, but really over here the term used   
   > in practice is "WAN" and increasingly "SD-WAN" where all the satellite   
   > sites detect each other and automatically form hub/spoke or full-mesh VPNs   
   > between themselves   
   >   
   > In common usage, "The intranet" more often refers to an internal   
   > IIS/sharepoint site, that a few years ago would have only been reachable   
   > from the LAN/WAN, but now with cloud usage, is probably reachable from   
   > anywhere subject to multifactor authentication or geofencing ...   
   >   
   >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intranet   
      
   These were nodes in different countries. And the labs there, would   
   have web pages about lab activities. Sorta like Microsoft Research in   
   a sense.   
      
   So rather than the web pages being "centralized" on a big node,   
   each division and department was responsible for setting up   
   a server in a local server room, and also for the programming.   
   My department had its own web master (one web master for   
   say a hundred people in a group). The web pages could not   
   be seen from the Internet. Only the big machine that served   
   the company advertising, was on the Internet side.   
      
   Because of the size of this thing, it also served for certain   
   kinds of network tests.   
      
   The most amusing part of this thing, was the node in the middle   
   of the Pacific Ocean. Some sales office was connected (so the sales   
   people could get product data). That's just to give you some idea   
   how silly this was. The data rate to the Pacific island was pretty   
   damn slow.   
      
   One of the downsides of the thing, was the scale of it, and   
   exactly how many web pages it had. When a thing is a chaos-net,   
   someone has to scan it and generate statistics. And the management,   
   I think they were shocked at what had happened. I guess someone   
   did the math to figure out what the salary-equivalent of the   
   effort was, company wide.   
      
   If there had been a single centralized server, feeding off an IT budget,   
   it would have been easier to "pull the plug" on it.   
      
      Paul   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)