O primeiro traballo fóra da facultade en 1991, Tiven a sorte de traballar para unha empresa de manufactura con 13 locais, 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.

O proxecto rula ao longo e estou enviado a Baltimore cun novo compañeiro de traballo, Jeff. Our job was to power up the Unix box, comproba se o A / S estaba funcionando, instalar o sistema ERP, configurar ERP, train people on the ERP and do custom work for folks on the spot. (Este foi un traballo de soño, sobre todo vindo en liña recta fóra da facultade). Before we could really get off the ground, que necesitabamos para descomprimir todos os tubos verdes, put them on desks and wire them. And the best part was that we had to put the RJ11 connectors on ourselves.

Por algunha razón que eu nunca entendín e realmente nunca pensei en preguntar sobre o tempo, Nós tiñamos tido algúns empresa contratante vir e executar cabo en toda a planta, but we didn’t have them put on the connectors. Así, there was a "patch box" with dozens of of unlabeled cables in the "computer room" e estes serpenteava en torno do edificio para varios lugares do edificio.

Traballamos o noso camiño a través del, ao longo dun fin de semana, probar cada fío, poñer un conector (asegurarse de que era recta vs. cruzado), garantindo a configuración de bits nos tubos verdes e impresoras estaban correctos, 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.

Pero, 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, pero a impresora se converteu nun pesadelo de tres semanas.

Se non sabe, ou que suprimiu, xestionar tubos verdes e impresoras deste xeito, there are various options that you deal with by setting various pins. 8-bocado, 7-bocado, paridade (par / impar / ningún), probably others. If you get one of those settings wrong, o tubo ou a impresora aínda mostra cousas, pero será xerga total, or it will be gibberish with a lot of recognizable stuff in between. Por suposto, these pins are hard to see and have to be set by using a small flat-edge screw driver. And they are never standard.

Montar a primeira de moitas chamadas rápidas co NJ cara (un inimigo ordenador grisalho que probablemente nos maldí até hoxe). 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, nunca está seguro de se estaba facendo isto correctamente.

É hora de ir en directo, todo en Baltimore está cantarolando, pero non podemos comezar a impresora maldito en NJ para traballar! 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", coa esperanza de que quizais haxa algún indicio de que o lixo que vai nos dicir o que estamos facendo de malo.

Cando chegamos o fax, we immediately knew what was wrong. Ver, our method of testing whether we had configured a printer correctly was to issue an "lp" comando coma este:

lp / etc / passwd

Basicamente, 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:

ferreiro:*:100:100:8A-74(oficina):/home / smith:/usr / bin / sh
:*:200:0::/home / invitado:/usr/bin/sh  

We had been printing out the password file over and over again for several weeks and it was printing correctly. Con todo, para o usuario final, it was "printing garbage".

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