Ag mo chéad phost amach as an choláiste i 1991, Bhí mé ádh a bheith ag obair do chuideachta déantúsaíochta le 13 suímh, not including its corporate HQ in New Jersey. I joined just when the company was rolling out a new ERP system. We were a small IT department of about ten people altogether, two of whom Did Not Travel. Part of the project involved replacing IBM System 36 boxes with HP hardware and HPUX. Everyone used green tubes to access the system.

Rollaí an tionscadal chomh maith agus tá mé ag sheoladh síos go Dún na Séad le nua comh-oibrí, Jeff. Our job was to power up the Unix box, déan cinnte an O / S bhí ag rith, shuiteáil ar an gcóras ERP, chumrú an ERP, train people on the ERP and do custom work for folks on the spot. (Bhí sé seo i gcomhair poist bhrionglóid, go háirithe ag teacht díreach amach as an choláiste). Before we could really get off the ground, is gá dúinn a unpack go léir na feadáin glas, put them on desks and wire them. And the best part was that we had to put the RJ11 connectors on ourselves.

Ar chúis éigin riamh go bhfuil mé thuig agus níor shíl i ndáiríre a iarraidh mar gheall ar an am, bhí againn go raibh roinnt cuideachta conarthachta thagann chomh maith agus a reáchtáil cábla ar fud na plandaí, but we didn’t have them put on the connectors. Mar sin,, there was a "patch box" with dozens of of unlabeled cables in the "computer room" agus snaked seo timpeall an fhoirgnimh go dtí áiteanna éagsúla san fhoirgneamh.

D'oibríomar ar ár bhealach a dhéanamh tríd sé le linn an deireadh seachtaine, tástáil gach sreang, a chur ar a cónascaire (ag déanamh cinnte go raibh sé díreach vs. thrasnaigh), cinntiú na socruithe beagán ar an feadáin glas agus printéirí a bhí ceart, labeling wires, making sure that "getty" was running correctly for each port and probably a thousand other things that I’ve suppressed since then. It all came together quite nicely.

Ach, there was one important cable that we couldn’t figure out. The plant in Baltimore had a relationship with a warehousing location in New Jersey. Some orders placed in Baltimore shipped out of that location. There were two wires that we had to connect to the HPUX box: a green tube and a printer. The green tube was easy, ach an printéir iompú isteach i nightmare trí seachtaine.

Más rud é nach bhfuil a fhios agat é, nó suppressed sé, ag déileáil le feadáin glas agus printéirí ar an mbealach seo, there are various options that you deal with by setting various pins. 8-giotán, 7-giotán, paireacht (fiú / corr / aon cheann), probably others. If you get one of those settings wrong, an fheadáin nó chuig printéir Léiríonn fós stuif, ach beidh sé gibberish iomlán, or it will be gibberish with a lot of recognizable stuff in between. Ar ndóigh,, these pins are hard to see and have to be set by using a small flat-edge screw driver. And they are never standard.

Leagtha muid suas an chéad cheann glaonna tapaidh go leor leis an Guy NJ (a hater ríomhaire grizzled a mallachtaí is dócha dúinn ar an lá seo). We got the green tube working pretty quickly, but we couldn’t get the printer to work. It kept "printing garbage". We would create a new RJ11 connector, switching between crossed and straight. We would delete the port and re-created in Unix. We went through the arduous task of having him explain to us the pin configuration on the printer, riamh cinnte i ndáiríre má bhí sé ag déanamh i gceart.

Tá sé faoi am le dul beo, Tá gach rud i nDún na Séad portaireacht, ach ní féidir linn a fháil ar an printéir cursed suas i NJ a bheith ag obair! We’ve exhausted all possibilities except for driving back up to NJ to work on the printer in person. To avoid all that driving, we finally ask him to fax us what he’s getting when it’s "garbage", ag súil go b'fhéidir go mbeidh roinnt leid sa truflais a insint dúinn cad tá ag éirí linn mícheart.

Nuair a fuair muid an facs, we immediately knew what was wrong. Féach, our method of testing whether we had configured a printer correctly was to issue an "lp" ordú mar seo:

LP / etc / passwd

Go bunúsach, we printed out the unix password file. It’s always present and out of the box, always just one page. You standard Unix password file looks something like this:

gabha:*:100:100:8A-74(oifig):/baile / gabha:/usr / bin / sh
:*:200:0::/baile / aoi:/usr/bin/sh  

We had been printing out the password file over and over again for several weeks and it was printing correctly. Mar sin féin, don úsáideoir deiridh, it was "printing garbage".

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