Re: [tlug] Problems with au ADSL/network setup

[David Smith-Uchida <dave@example.com>]

Heh - I used to work for a supercomputer manufacturer (FPS Computing).  We were a fairly small shop (about 50 people in engineering HW & SW) and in the evening the calls to the main number would go on "night bell" and ring throughout the building and you could dial a code to pick up and answer.  One evening, like a fool, I picked up and it was this professor from UCLA who had purchased one of our machines with her research grant and the networking had suddenly stopped working - or, rather it was half working because some hosts worked and some did not.  She was very upset that her half-million dollar machine was not working and wanted it fixed RIGHT NOW.  We were outside of support hours but I was the networking guy, so I dialed in and started poking around.  About an hour later, I called her back and the call went something like this:

Me: "Did someone change the hosts file today?" (this was actually so long ago that DNS was not commonly used and everyone on the Internet had a big huge hosts file)
Her: "Yes, but they didn't make any real changes, they just fixed the formatting."
Me: "Well, you see, there's some weirdness in the way that Unix interprets numbers and when you put leading zeroes into addresses (e.g. 010.010.100.101) it interprets those parts with leading zeros as octal and the numbers aren't what you think they are."
Her: "Oh"

And what did I learn from this?  Don't answer the phone after hours.

On Dec 8, 2013, at 8:57 AM, "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com> wrote:

> Stefan A. writes:
> 
>> So I finally had time to go over and see my friend last week to take
>> another shot at fixing his modem + router problems and, well, this is
>> somewhat embarrassing ...
> 
> "Let it be a lesson ..."  But seriously, that kind of thing happens.
> The only way you can learn about them most of the time is if they
> happen to you.  You won, this time ... be happy!
> 
> My favorite story is from my sister, who is a system analyst.  She got
> a panic call from a guy who everybody detests who was "on deadline"
> which he thought justified pulling her (rather than the appropriate
> tech) away from her work (which of course had its own deadline).  So
> she got there, immediately diagnosed the problem as being outside of
> her job description and had him send the PC to tech support.  As
> expected, he called tech support and let them do the heavy lugging,
> which meant the he didn't notice it was impossible to unplug the power
> because he'd kicked the power cable out of the wall....
> 
> It's a measure of how much he was detested that the hardware guyz
> lugged the PC all the way down to the shop where they plugged it in,
> tested, brought it back and tested in in situ.  The guy was almost in
> tears over his deadline.  "That ain't working, that's the way to do
> it, you play your guitar on the M T V"
> 
> All's well that ends well!
> 
> 
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